Sleepless (6 page)

Somewhere in the garden, a cat meows. “I thought you said I had to wait. That I was too much of a newbie or something.”

“You are, but you’ll have no ability to concentrate on your studies unless your mind is sharp and clear. And for that, you’ll need to perform a seduction.”

His eyes brighten and he rocks back and forth on his branch. “Bam-chicka-bam-bam. Yeah, baby. Lead the way. You said Julia’s next?”

“No, I never said you’d be seducing Julia,” I say. At that moment, that cat appears, rounding the corner of Vicki’s house. It’s yellow and fat, and unlike a human, it can sense us. It purrs, warming to us immediately. Animals love us. I take it as serendipity that this feline is here at this exact time. “I said you’d have to perform a seduction, but you are too new to perform it on a human.”

He studies me, then the cat, and his jaw locks. “No friggin’ way.”

“We cannot continue if you don’t.” I stroke the cat’s soft fur. “And cats are easier. It’s a nice starting point.”

“I am not. Freaking. Getting with. A cat,” he says, curling his lips in disgust.

“As I said, you are thinking about it like a human. Remember, you are no longer human.”

He eyes the animal and frowns. I have to say, it’s quite satisfying.

CHAPTER 7
Julia

G
riffin was the only customer I ever had who ordered item number 1.26 on Sweetie Pi’s menu. Number 1.26 is an egg cream, a drink made with chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer. It is gross. I’m just thinking about how my egg cream—making skills will seriously suffer without him when a gaggle of senior girls line up outside the stand, studying the menu. They’re all holding shopping bags from Forever 21 and Hollister and smacking their lips. Since I’ve worked at this stand in the food court since freshman year, pre-Griffin, I have a knack for predicting what certain customers will order. Judging by their waistlines, I can tell that these girls are fat-free vanilla yogurt in a kiddie-size cake cone all the way.

Well, actually, I can’t claim psychic powers; I’ve waited on these girls a zillion times. One, Kiki Nickelson, has been coming here just as long as, if not longer
than, I’ve been working here. Considering how often I see her at the mall, her dad must be harboring some serious guilt issues over giving his daughter such a goofy name. He seems to have surrendered to her full control of the credit cards as a peace offering. She looks at me and says, “Oh, hey, Julia. What’s up?”

The good thing about being Front-Page Julia is that people who would otherwise call me “hey, you” do know my name. The bad thing is that that’s about all they care to know.

“Not much,” I say, still sporting my “can I help you?” smile.

Kiki’s face falls, and I can tell right away that she has made the connection between Griffin and me. Tears flood her eyes—real, honest-to-goodness tears. “Ohmigosh, I am so so so so so sorry about Griffin,” she says, smacking her heart with her manicured hand.

“Thanks,” I say. She and Griffin dated, many moons ago, until, as he put it, “I got so sick of her I had to Kiki her ass out the door.” He said she was about as high maintenance as the space shuttle.

The other girls offer their condolences and put in their orders. I was wrong; they all order fat-free vanilla in kiddie cups instead of cones. When I hand over the goods, Kiki is still giving me the sad puppy eyes. “You look like you’re holding up pretty well.”

I nod. The biggest problem with tragedies is that afterward, the world expects those affected by them to cease all functioning. I think everyone was expecting me to be lying here, a mangled heap of body parts, like a Picasso painting.

“If you need anything, just let us know, okay, Jules?” another girl says, dropping a five-dollar bill into the little tips canister at checkout, then patting the top of it as if she’s donating to the Dead Boyfriend Support League.

I smile, knowing that if I ever attempted to take them up on that offer, they’d run like hell in the other direction. My experience with tragedy is that people will offer condolences and support but never be around when you want to collect. That was the way it was when I was seven; I was utterly alone. Yeah, things were better when I started dating Griffin; it felt like I was making my way back to Normalsville after an extended absence. Being Griffin’s girlfriend showed everyone I wasn’t contagious, or a ticking time bomb ready to explode. That gave me confidence. I cringe, remembering how I’d get whenever someone ignored me, or gave me that mock-sympathetic look, or whispered behind my back,
There’s that girl! You know, the one who …
I’d cry and get all flustered, which just kept the rumor mill churning out news of how Julia Devine would never, ever be normal again.
She’s obviously still scarred
, they’d say.
Mentally unstable
.

Griffin’s reputation also preceded him. I knew he’d had a long line of girlfriends, and every week, someone different was gossiping in the girls’ locker room about how difficult he was. Most of the time, they would whine about how he never took anything in life seriously, which sounded just wonderful to me. Because if there was one thing I was sick of, it was people taking me so seriously. And then Kiki would say, “He called me higher maintenance than the space shuttle!” and Bad Breath Britney would say, “He told me that whenever I opened my mouth, it smelled like a raw-sewage plant.” They were all so insulted, but the more I heard about him, the more I liked him. He was
right
, after all. He just called things as he saw them. They, maybe, were too sensitive to put up with it, but I knew that if I ever had the chance, I would handle it. I would force myself to.

And then, miracle of miracles, the chance came.

It was a Saturday, right after Thanksgiving, so the mall was packed solid. I was already a little frazzled, because one of the girls who usually worked with me had just quit, and I was stuck with a bunch of newbies who kept asking stupid questions like “What is the difference between sprinkles and jimmies?” The line for ice cream wrapped past the Sunglass Hut stand, it was the end of the day, and my feet were killing me. And then there he was, standing in front of me.

At first I didn’t think I could speak, but I channeled my inner Avon lady, put on my plastic smile, and said, “How may I help you?”

He rubbed his stubbly chin and studied the menu. The first thing one noticed about Griffin was his thick mop of reddish blond hair, which always fell just a tiny bit below his eyebrows. When he looked up, his gorgeous eyes were visible; he had eyes that were round and big and blue, enough to make some babies jealous. And he was tall and broad and substantial; you couldn’t help seeing him. At Sweetie Pi’s, we pride ourselves on having “3.14 hundred menu items!” which customers order by the number. Griffin smiled slyly at me—his smiles were always laced with mischief—and said, “Do you know all these menu items by heart?”

Leave it to Griffin to have no concern at all about the several dozen people waiting in line behind him. I’d been working at Sweetie Pi’s on Saturdays since the summer had ended, so although I wasn’t the master of the Sweetie Pi’s operations manual, I was pretty competent. But right then I didn’t want to play games, even with Griffin. My smile dissolved. “Yep. What do you want?”

“Um, how is your three point one three?”

I pushed away from the counter. “Is that what you want?”

“Depends,” he said. “Do you know what a three point one three is?”

“Of course,” I said. “Is that what you want?”

He leaned over the counter, reached up, and covered my eyes. “Don’t look. What is it?”

I squirmed away. “Apple pie sundae. Is that what you want?”

“Eh, on second thought, no. How about your one point one zero?”

I stared straight at him. “The chocolate brownie fudge bomb?”

He crossed his arms in front of him. “Point two nine.”

“Vanilla custard shake,” I replied, unblinking.

“Point eight six.”

“Lemon cookie bar blast.”

“One point one four.”

“Funnel cake.”

“Two point zero three.”

“Blueberry ice cream and caramel sauce on a waffle.”

He grinned. “Impressive,” he said in his Darth Vader voice.

I couldn’t help breaking into a smile, but then I caught sight of the next person in line, this old lady, looking like she was about to launch her boulder-sized purse over the counter at me. “Is that what you want?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I’ll take a one point two six.”

I swallowed. What was a 1.26, again? “Sure,” I said, then furtively looked at the menu. Egg cream. What the hell was that? Did it involve raw eggs? I’d have to take out the Sweetie Pi’s manual to figure out that one, and then my cover as Sweetie
Pi’s Master would be blown. I quickly turned to the back of the kitchen, trying to look like I knew what I was doing, when I caught him smirking out of the corner of my eye. He was totally on to me. “Ah,” he said. “You are not a Jedi yet.”

The line was growing longer, and someone turned up the heat on my cheeks. But then I remembered who I was dealing with. Griffin Colburn’s whole purpose on earth was to get a rise out of people and never let them live it down. I calmly walked to the back and consulted the manual, then retrieved the ingredients. I poured a bit of milk into the bottom of a Sweetie Pi’s fountain-drink cup, then filled the cup to the top with seltzer and drizzled the chocolate syrup over the foam. When I handed it to him and he paid, I said, “Have a nice day, Darth,” and smiled as big as I could.

When I got off work, two hours later, he was sitting outside, waiting. For me? I was glad it was dark, because I was positive I had a chocolate-sauce smudge on my nose and quite possibly a raspberry one. It was cold, so I pulled my jacket tighter over my Sweetie Pi’s T-shirt and tried to walk past him. He stood up as I did and said, “Your name is Julia. You’re a freshman, right?”

I turned to him, thinking, Oh my God! My vocal cords froze up. Luckily, my facial muscles were too damn tired and cold to react in surprise, so I must have looked noncommittal and bored, like
Yeah, and who the hell are you?

“Do you speak anything other than the language of ice cream?” he finally asked.

I was thinking he would go into the whole thing that some insensitive jerks would approach me with:
You were that girl. The one
from the papers. Right?
But he didn’t, and he didn’t look like he wanted to satisfy his morbid curiosity by getting the inside scoop on it. Still, I was suspicious, so I said, “Darth Vader?”

He laughed. “So, you going to the fair tomorrow?”

My mind kicked into overdrive. Fair … fair … fair. What fair? This was cruel and unusual punishment for a girl who had just worked a mind-numbing eight-hour shift at a restaurant that combined food and geometry.

“The Brighton Christmas Tree Fair?” he finally said.

“Oh. I don’t know,” I said, still frozen, because oh my God, was he asking me out?

“Julia,” he said in his Darth Vader voice, “I am not your father. That means we can go to the Brighton fair together and nobody will look at us funny.”

I couldn’t help it: I burst out laughing. After that, I realized that if I ever wanted to look calm, cool, and collected, all I had to do was pretend to be bored and tired and just keep my mouth shut. Easy. It didn’t matter what I was feeling on the inside; it was all about what I showed on the outside. From that day on, I was officially Griffin’s shadow. We were always together. He hated it when I rolled my eyes and looked away, but he also couldn’t get enough of it. Most girls would pout or complain … but I had found the thing that made him weakest—pretending not to care, even when I did. Griffin always spoke in slogans from television commercials, and one of his favorites was “Never let ’em see you sweat.” After a little practice, I was a pro at that.

Now I pour some milk into a cup, squirt in some seltzer, and drizzle on some chocolate syrup, then take a sip. Still gross.

“You eating into the profits, Ippie?” a voice calls over the counter. “Mr. Pi would not be pleased.”

I take another sip and roll my eyes. Bret works at Gyro Hut, across the food court, but the food there is borderline inedible. He’s constantly coming over here to eat into Mr. Pi’s profits. I scoop a cone full of rocky road, his favorite, and hand it to him. “Don’t you have a lamb to slaughter or something?”

“Oh, my little
tzatziki
,” he says, grinning. He usually uses the word
“tzatziki”
a hundred times in one conversation at the food court, because he likes it, which makes food court conversations with him especially annoying. “You know I don’t slaughter lambs after noon.”

“How can I forget?”

He stands there idly in his white paper hat and hummus-stained apron, reading the menu, I guess. It appears he has forgotten his ice cream, because chocolate trickles down his wrist, and he doesn’t seem to care. I find myself wishing I had a customer, but the mall is pretty dead today. “So … what’s up?” he finally says.

“Um … not much.” Scintillating conversation. Only then does it strike me just how weird things are with Griffin gone. Like Griffin was the central link in the chain that held us all together.

“Ippie … you’re like a ghost now.” His voice is playful.

I stare at him as he licks the ice cream. “Huh?”

“Like, I rarely see you.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. I saw him at school two days ago, and at the track meet yesterday, and here today. Does he want to hang with me when I use the bathroom, too? Okay, so our interactions have been kind of short compared to when Griffin was around and we’d spend hours at his house, goofing off. But Griffin is gone. And I can’t say I’ve been pining
for time with Bret the past few days. If I hung out that much with him, it would be like we were
together
. I’m about to make a remark like that when I see the way he’s looking at me. It’s not a normal Bret look. It takes me back to the track, when he pulled me so close I could feel his breath on my cheek and smell his cinnamon Mentos. It’s a look that kind of makes me think “together” is exactly what he has in mind.