None of the Regular Rules (7 page)

CHAPTER
EIGHT

The first full week after school started, signs had gone up to advertise auditions for the fall play—
Into the Woods
. “A musical?” Ella moaned when she saw the
posters
for the first time. “I’m cool with trying out for a play. But a musical? And
Into the Woods
? You’ve got to be kidding me. Screw number six on Suzy’s list. Fairy tales are ridiculous. I don’t want to try out for the school play.”

“Fairy tales are romantic,” Grace had countered, nuzzling against Ian. Ian, who was apparently bound to Grace with some sort of unbreakable twine, had wrapped his arm around her and kissed her on the forehead. They’d been inseparable since right after Johnny’s party. When Ian had found out about us going to the party, he had scolded Grace for letting us drag her along to a party with alcohol. She’d apologized and promised that it would never happen again, even though Ella and I had reminded her that Ian wasn’t her boss or her father, and that we hadn’t dragged her anywhere. She didn’t appreciate our input, and now Ian would hardly let her out of his sight.

“Not the fairy tales in
Into the Woods
,” Ella spat back. “They’re messed
up
. And I’m not singing in front of people. I’ll design sets. That’s as close as I’ll come to an audition.”

“You’re constantly singing show tunes,” I’d reminded her. “You have a gorgeous voice.”

“In the shower. I sound good in the shower. Alone.”

“I’ve never showered with you, and I think your voice is lovely. Perhaps it’s even more beautiful underwater, but I know it sounds good on land, too.”

Ella grimaced. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”

Now, a few weeks later—the day of the auditions—
we’d all agreed to meet up at lunch to practice our audition songs again. Grace bailed at the last minute, begging off for something or other she had to do with Ian. But Ella hung out at my locker after fourth period and kicked her boot-clad toes against Andy Eisenberg’s locker. He materialized just as she began to beat a tune.

“If you keep kicking, the hamster is going to get upset.” Andy fixed his eyes on Ella with an even gaze. His hair stood straight up on the top of his head, like an unintentional pompadour, and his ears poked out in an elfin way. Andy was actually sort of cute, if you could overlook the kookiness, which I just couldn’t. He was way too weird for me—there was last year’s sandwich experiment, for one, and then the little day-to-day things that kind of creeped me out. Like the way he’d dance up to his locker and sing songs into the air vent. Not entirely normal.

I could tell Ella didn’t want to engage in a dialogue with Andy, but when someone mentions a hamster in the context of a locker, it’s sort of impossible to ignore. “What hamster?” she asked, one eyebrow up.

Andy smiled. “Please don’t kick the door. It could be considered animal cruelty.”

“Are you saying you have a hamster in your locker?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Andy said serenely. “You’re inferring
—using the context of our conver
sation to arrive at a logical conclusion.”

“I know what inference is,” she spat. I laughed. “Do you have a hamster in that locker? Because if you do, that’s serious animal cruelty.”

“I cannot say,” Andy said with a smile, then left without opening his locker.

Ella and I looked at each other, then cracked up. “It’s impossible, right?” I asked. “Last year he kept that sandwich in there all year. Do you think he’s holding a hamster hostage this year?”

Ella pressed her ear up against his locker. “I don’t hear anything. No scratching or moans of loneliness from a tiny rodent.” She pulled her ear off of Andy’s locker just as Peter Martinson went past. Her smile was fixed on her face, like a plastic doll’s. When he was out of sight, her face fell and she said, “I think Andy’s fibbing. He is a theater guy, after all—don’t they like to make up stories?”

“I wouldn’t put anything past him,” I said, closing my own locker. I’d grabbed my sandwich and an apple, and one of the spare Clif bars I kept in a box at the back of my locker for Ella. She sometimes forgot her lunch—but refused to buy school lunch, on account of their tasteless, all-beige vegetarian options—and I never wanted her to go hungry.
As we walked toward the side door, Ella trailed behind me, watching over her shoulder to see if Andy would return to his locker. I pulled her along and said, “He’ll have to open it eventually. If there’s a hamster inside, he’d need to feed it, right?”

“You would hope!” Ella cried. “What if he’s treating the hamster like he did the sandwich? Like, just keeping it in there to see how long it lives before it starts to stink?”

I laughed again. “He’s not a bad guy. He’s not going to kill an animal just for his stupid locker experiment.”

“It’s on your head if he does.” She held her chin up. “So where should we practice? Somewhere that no one can hear us, preferably.”

“Everyone is going to hear you this afternoon,” I reminded her. “The auditions are public.”

She moaned. “I know. But that’s different—it’s just the theater people that actually go to listen, and they’re so busy thinking about their own auditions that they’re not really listening to anyone else.”

“That’s not true!” I protested. I’d been dreading the auditions that afternoon, too—the idea that people would be watching me, up on stage, was terrifying. I knew that in those situations, everyone was listening and judging. It was all just so public. “Everyone’s watching everything. We’re all considered competition.”

“Oh, stop being so self-centered. No one really cares what you sound like. They’re just concerned about their own performance. It’s not like you’re going to take the lead role from Emily Hammond anyway. No offense, Soph, but you’re not that great.”

“So if no one’s really listening, then why do you care about where we practice before auditions?”

She gaped at me. “It’s the people who won’t be at auditions that make me nervous. Non–theater people.”

“Peter?”

“Peter, or one of the intellectual cheerleaders.”

“Since when do you care what the intellectual cheerleaders are thinking about you?”

Ella sighed hugely. “They make me nervous. You’re not supposed to be stupid and smart at the same time. But somehow the intellectual cheerleaders are just that—perfectly smart girls who inexplicably like to jump around and yell random, rhyming crap.” She lowered her voice. “And they have access to Peter on the bus to away games, which gives them power that intimidates me. Let’s just go sit in your car, okay? It’s the safest place. Maybe we can drive around or something?”

As we walked out to the parking lot, I asked, “You’re not going to be like this with everything else on the list, are you?”

Ella kicked at the grass along the side of the walkway and asked, “Like what? I agreed to do these random things on someone else’s wish list, didn’t I? I’m trying out
for the play
.”

“Yeah, we’re trying out…but it sort of feels like you’re just doing it out of a sense of obligation. Don’t feel like you have to do the stuff on the list, just because of me.” I pushed my key into the lock on Ella’s side of the car. Something was
permanently
jammed in the driver’s side keyhole—gum, maybe?—so I always had to unlock the doors from the passenger side. It was a little inconvenient when I was alone.

“Why are you getting so defensive about it? I thought the list was supposed to be for fun. You look all scowly and stuff.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, realizing I was taking my own frustrations out on her. “But it just seems stupid that we’re intimidated by stuff like going to Johnny’s party and trying out for the school play. I mean, if you think about the sort of stuff that
could
be on a list of dares, our list seems pretty tame.”

“What else should be on Suzy’s list?” Ella asked. “I think stealing a motorcycle and skipping out on the bill at a restaurant is a little out there. I may play the part of a rebel, but you know that stuff pushes my limits.”

“Yeah, but jumping off Hanging Rock and changing a tire aren’t really that interesting. Most of the stuff she has on her list are things everyone at East Central does at some point during high school. Right? I mean, would we be approaching this whole list thing differently if it were a little crazier? Like, what if Suzy had included things like—I don’t know—drive to the Grand Canyon to pee off the edge?”

“Ew. Is that something you wish was on the list?”

“No, it’s just an example of something that
could
be on a list of dares. A list of dares that was more interesting than
our
list of dares. That’s the sort of thing that should be on a bucket list, and we’re intimidated by stupid stuff like kissing Peter Martinson and trying out for the freaking school play?”

“Kissing Peter
is
intimidating,” Ella muttered. “I’d probably rather pee off the edge of the Grand Canyon than face that hurdle. Why, exactly, are you fantasizing about peeing off the edge of the Grand Canyon?”

“I don’t know. I’m not.” I sat in the driver’s seat without turning the key in the ignition. “Or maybe I am?” I fiddled with my keychain. “Maybe I’m thinking about the Grand Canyon because, when I think about the prospect of doing something like peeing off the edge, my mind immediately goes to a place where I think about the logistics of such a task—the reason why it would be impossible or silly or dangerous or a stupid waste of time. My mind doesn’t even, for a second, go to a place where I let myself imagine how much fun the actual act of getting to the edge of the Grand Canyon would be.” I blew all of this out in a huff, a little surprised at how tightly it was wound up inside of me. Then I realized I was musing philosophically on the excitement of peeing at the Grand Canyon, and took a breath. “I don’t know, Ella, I guess it’s just that—well, I really do want to take more chances. Everything I do is really
safe
. It’s parent approved. I’m boring.”

“You’re a good girl—a rule follower,” Ella agreed. She made a funny face. “As hard as it is for me to admit it, we all are. Grace, obviously, and you…and I guess I am, too. It’s just our nature.”

“Well, our nature is boring,” I said. “I want to get arrested.”

Ella snorted out a laugh. “You don’t want to get arrested.”

“I do! Or I want to do something that carries the risk of arrest.”

“We can do that.”

“Really?” I asked hopefully. “We can try to get arrested?”

Ella laughed. “Let’s just try out for the play first. Then we can talk about it further, if you like. Maybe we should get Grace into the conversation, too—I know you’re never going to convince either of us to pee off the edge of the Grand Canyon, but it wouldn’t kill sweet Gracie if she let loose a little. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” I agreed. As she started to sing, I whispered, “Can I at least tempt you with the idea of peeing off Hanging Rock?”

CHAPTER
NINE

We survived the auditions, which were actually sort of fun and generally uneventful. The rest of the week flew by, since neither of us was holding our breath for a part or anything. They weren’t posting the lists for a few weeks, until after lead role callbacks, so by the time Friday came around, I’d tucked away all thoughts of the musical and moved on to our backyard camping.

I easily found the tent hidden behind the basement stairs, under two boxes of Shane’s old swimming trophies. My brother had been a superstar swimmer before he discovered beer and got fat in college. His swimming prowess was a source of immense pride for my father, who had also been an excellent swimmer before he discovered beer and got fat in college.

Whenever I looked at my dad and my brother, it made me think about how people sometimes say that, eventually, everyone turns into their parents. If that was true, I wondered, would I rather end up like my dad, or my mom? Neither fate tempted me. Was it possible to escape the inevitability of becoming your parents, or was the life I saw them living the best I could hope for? Shudder. Maybe I would be lucky and get eaten by a bear instead. It was preferable to the alternative.

It took some pulling, but I eventually extracted the masses of fabric from the storage bin the tent had been stuffed in and pulled the whole mess out to the backyard. I laid the tarp out next to the pumpkin patch and stood surveying the pile of confusion in front of me. I’d never assembled a tent, and was pretty sure it wasn’t as simple as the people at REI always made it seem. When Ian dropped Ella and Grace off a little after six, I was still trying to figure out what portion of the pile of loose fabric was rain flap, and which part was the tent itself.

“Do you want me to do it?” Ian asked, smirking. “Or maybe I should just take my girlfriend home before the tent collapses on her?”

I glared at him. “I think we’ve got it.”

“Looks that way,” Ian said. He continued to linger, pointing out our mistakes every few seconds until finally Ella told him it was time for him to leave.

“Girls’ night,” Ella said, shrugging. “No offense.”

“Call me later, Grace,” he said, pulling her in for a hug. “Sleep tight.”

“You too,” Grace cooed. “Love you.”

After a lot of false starts, we eventually managed to put together a lopsided-but-upright tent just before the sun dipped below the horizon. We lay inside the tent with the flaps open, all three of us squeezed into the tent side by side, staring up into the sky as it shifted and grew dark. Streaks of pink and orange ripped through the black and blue above the lake. “It looks like the windows at my church,” Grace said, her face glowing pink in the light.

“Reminds me of cotton candy,” Ella said. “No offense to Jesus.”

“Or taffy,” I suggested. “The kind that gets stuck in your mouth and makes your spit thick.”

We filled the tent with blankets and pillows from my family room, then zipped ourselves inside again. It was like a little den, someplace outside our regular lives, and the whole scene reminded me of grade school. “You gonna pee in your bed tonight, El?” I teased as Ella snuggled between two duvets. The last time any of us had gone camping was in fifth-grade Girl Scouts. A snake had found its way into Ella’s sleeping bag before bed, and when she climbed in to go to sleep, it had slithered out and across her pillow. She’d been so scared that she had peed all over the floor of the tent.

She rolled into me, crushing me against the side of the tent. “No,” she answered. “I’m going to pee off Hanging Rock, right?”

“What?” Grace asked. “Why would you pee off Hanging Rock?”

We briefly filled her in on our earlier conversation, and she crinkled her nose in response. “If we’d found a list in your car that included stuff like ‘pee off the Grand Canyon’ or ‘eat meat from every part of a cow,’ we would never have decided to do any of it.”

Ella groaned in response. “I would not eat meat from any part of a cow, let alone every part of a cow. Who would do that?”

“You can buy a whole cow,” I told her. “My relatives in Montana do that every year—they get a cow share.”

“You share a cow? As in, a
dead
cow?” Ella asked with a sneer. “What do you do, pass it back and forth from house to house, ripping pieces off its body and stuffing them in your mouth? You know that’s barbaric, right?”

“You guys!” Grace interrupted. “That’s all beside the point. What I’m saying is, the list only seemed appealing and
possible
because most of the stuff on it feels familiar—it feels like Suzy lived a life like ours. At least, that’s how I see it.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess I see your point.” I pulled the list out of my pocket, where I often kept it. I liked having it with me. Sometimes in class I’d take it out and try to imagine what Suzy was thinking about when she wrote it. Had she worked on it with her friends? Did anyone even know she had a list? Was my mom right—had Suzy had the same feelings of boredom and dissatisfaction that were creeping into my life senior year?

I remembered little snippets of conversation I’d overheard as a child, when my mom—the oldest in their family—and my grandma sat in Gram’s living room discussing Suzy. I couldn’t remember anything specific about those overheard conversations, but I remembered how much I envied my aunt, because she always seemed like she could do whatever she wanted to do. The way they talked about her made it seem like she pushed boundaries and broke rules—something I never did.

“I guess I’ve just been thinking a lot lately about how I haven’t done anything to make myself stand out or define myself as something,” I said.

“You have a pink streak in your hair now,” Ella reminded me. “That stands out.”

“Yeah, exactly,” I said. “But I only did that because the list pushed me to do it. What else am I not doing that I could or should do? I’m leaving East Central with absolutely nothing to show for myself except some good grades and a record of never getting into trouble. I’ve only missed school four times since ninth grade, and that was when we went to visit Shane at college!”

“There’s nothing
wrong
with that,” Grace said.

“I know,” I agreed. “But I guess what I’m thinking is, if I haven’t done anything to push myself yet, am I ever going to? If the extent of my high school excitement so far is going to Johnny Rush’s party—literally just
showing up
, which was scary enough—then what am I going to do with my life?” I looked at my friends, who stared back at me. I’d made a rotten segue from the list of dares to the rest of our lives, but the list had gotten me thinking about what I’d really
done
in my almost eighteen years. Not much.

I continued, “What if I don’t ever do anything interesting? What if I can’t figure out if there’s anything I’m really, super good at…and I’m just one of those people who goes along, all humdrum and mopey through life, and
gets along just fine
—to quote my mom. I don’t want to get along just fine. I want to be happy.”

“It’s up to you to decide if you’re going to be mopey or cheerful,” Grace reminded me. She pushed her curls away from her face and they sprang back in front of her shoulders, as though they, too, had an insane energy that made it impossible to just relax.

“That’s not always true. Sometimes it’s not up to you. Some people are prone to depression,” Ella reminded her. We knew she was talking about her mom, whose moods swung every which way and knocked people over as they toppled from up high to way down low. “Not everyone is as
graced
as you are with happiness, clarity, and light all the time.” The way Ella said this made me laugh, and broke the odd mood I’d set with my gloomy little soliloquy.

“Fine,” Grace conceded. “But it sounds like Sophie’s planning to graduate from high school and mope around for the next seventy years, just accepting whatever fate
plops into her lap. I’m not oka
y with that.” Grace lifted her brows and dared us to challenge her. “I’m not.”

“Yeah, I’m not either,” I seconded. “But the problem is, I don’t know what I want to
do
with my life, so I’m not going after anything specifically. Everyone else is, and I feel like I’m just
here
, you know?”

They both looked at me blankly—probably in part because they both seemed to have a really happy picture of where they were going in their minds and didn’t get that my future was a big, fat blank wall. But I also knew they were looking at me strangely because I’d never really complained about much before.

“What if I just fade into the background noise for the rest of my life?” I took a breath, then continued. I was starting to get sweaty inside the pile of blankets that was heaped on top of me and I kicked at them, irritated. “You guys know I don’t want to be an actress or anything, but I guess I’m just worried that my life won’t even deserve a Playbill!” I shoved at my pillow and it went sailing across the tent.

We all began to laugh, and I realized that just getting the words out had made me feel better. But I also knew Ella, Grace, and I wouldn’t be together after this year, and I think that was part of what scared me about not having it all figured out before we graduated. I worried that everyone else around me would quickly move forward
after high school, clip-clopping down their own personal yellow brick roads while I just meandered in the ditch on the side of the road to…
somewhere
.

I was tired of talking about it, so I blurted out, “I think I might be starving to death.”

Ella seemed relieved about the change of subject. “Me too!”

“What do you want?” I asked, hoping my parents would be asleep when I got inside. I couldn’t face them, in their matching flannel pants and shuffling slippers and distant optimism spiced up with a heaping tablespoon of caution.

“Pizza,” she said. “Green olive pizza. Do you think they deliver to backyards?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We don’t have any money anyway. We might have some pizza rolls in the freezer. Want me to check?”

“Yes. I’m going to eat someone’s arm if I don’t get food soon.”

Grace clucked at her. “Why didn’t you bring it up sooner?” she grouched. I could tell she was getting sleepy. She had stopped fidgeting, and I realized this was sort of late for her. She was one of those people who get up at six in the morning, just so she can get a jump on the day. This means she goes to bed ridiculously early—as long as all her homework is done.

“I didn’t know I was hungry before,” Ella snapped back. “I just realized it now. And
now
I’m starving.”

I sort of had to pee anyway, so I hopped over the pile of blankets that were still half covering me and started to unzip the tent. “Be back in a few with snackage.” I opened the screen, then peeled back the door and found myself face to face with a person.

“Aghhhh!” I screamed, rolling back into the tent. Visions of the backside-eating bear I’d teased my mom about came flying into my mind, and my heart pounded against my rib cage.

“Roar,” the person—bear?—growled. Grace and Ella both screamed, too.

After what felt like an eternity had passed, Ella shined our flashlight straight at whoever was peeping inside our tent.
“Johnny Rush?”

“In the flesh,” Johnny said, flashing his hand across his chest while his eyes shone aquamarine in the steady beam of light. “Evening, ladies.”

We all relaxed, but only slightly. It was good to know there wasn’t some sort of mass-murdering, bear-imitator lurking outside our tent—but in some ways, my
neighbor
lurking was a hair more disconcerting. How much of our conversation had he heard? How long, exactly, had he been lurking?

I plopped back into the tent and covered up with a blanket while Johnny grinned at us from the unzipped tent door. “Mind if I come in? The mosquitoes are eating me alive out here.” He slipped his shoes off and plopped his body onto the floor of the tent, then zipped it up behind himself. “You’re having a
slumber
party, Sophie, and you didn’t invite me?” He stretched his legs out in front of his body and got comfortable. I was both surprised by and impressed at his ability to make himself comfortable in this situation. It was just like the day he’d surprised me beside the pumpkin patch—and then invited himself to join me on the beach. Then the way he’d drifted in and out of groups on the beach at his party.

But I didn’t like that he kept sneaking up on me. And I felt an obligation to set some ground rules, now that he’d broken the neighborly seal and kept popping over the invisible fence between our yards. “How long have you been lurking out there, Johnny?” I demanded. “Don’t you think it’s a little creepy to sit outside someone’s tent?”

“I wasn’t lurking,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. Ella still had the flashlight fixed on his face, and I realized he wasn’t wearing his hat. His hair was all shaggy and messed up, and I kind of wished I could touch it. Strictly to see if he used product to get the casual surfer look that I wished I could achieve with my hair, of course. Not because I wanted to touch Johnny Rush’s hair. Definitely not. “I came over to see what was up with the tent.”