Take Me There (12 page)

Walking is the only thing that helps my brain calm down. And this is an awesome walking neighborhood. It’s so weird how in different parts of the city, some places have this incredible energy, like even the sunlight looks cleaner there. And it’s all about light and space and streets that seems to extend forever. And then you go to other places and it’s like some random sketchy neighborhood where no one wants to live.

This lady with big sunglasses and even bigger hair bumps into me as she passes by and doesn’t even say she’s sorry. That’s the thing about saying “sorry” or “excuse me” in this city. No one ever does. Or when we do apologize, we don’t actually say it clearly. We just whisper the outline of
excuse me
or form the word
sorry
with our mouth, as if we expect people to lip-read. It’s one of my frequent observations that I’ve listed under Quirky New Yorker Behavior in my spy notebook.

Not that I’m dissing on my people. New Yorkers are the most fabulous people anywhere. Especially if someone needs directions. I actually watched two people argue on a street corner for like five minutes over the best way to direct this tourist to Little Italy.

These three college girls are walking ahead of me. Probably going back to their NYU dorm. I can’t wait until I live in the dorms, with my own life and own rules and own way of living, without anyone constantly bothering me to clean my room.

The girls are so into their conversation that they don’t even realize I’m totally spying on them, walking way too close on the sidewalk.

They’re like:

“So then what’d you say?”

“I was just like, ‘Why are you being like this?’”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“And then what’d you say?”

I don’t want to stay too close to them, but I have to be close enough to listen. It’s walking a fine line, the whole invading-personal-space thing.

“You can tell a lot from a person’s body language,” one of the girls is explaining. “Did he have his arms crossed?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then how was he standing?”

“Can we go back to the last thing about him saying he’s not emotionally available?”

They’re obviously trying to decode some boy behavior, like what he meant by what he said and whether he’s ever going to like her as much as she likes him. That’s what it’s like when you’re in it. When you’re in it so deep you can’t see anything else and all you want to do is analyze everything he said and did until you’re exhausted. I’d be doing the same thing now with Ree, if I could. But there’s no way I can tell her about this.

Mom busts into my room like she was invited or something and goes, “I thought you were going to clean your room.”

And I’m like, “That was just my closet. Remember?” And I’m digging through piles of dirty laundry because I can’t find my iPod recharger cord, and Mom is inspecting the laundry piles with this disapproving look.

She’s like, “How hard is it to put your clothes in the hamper?”

I can’t believe she’s in here again. I really can’t even. Was she not just in here last night, ragging on me for being a slob?

But apparently that wasn’t a rhetorical question. So I’m like, “Um, well, let’s see. I have to pick them up, walk down the hall to the bathroom, lift up the lid to—” but she interrupts and goes, “These piles can’t continue.” As if they’re some mysterious random problem that keeps mutating and no one can control them. As if they’re bad behavior.

So I inform her that piles are a method of categorizing. And she’s like, “Categorizing what? A tremendous mess?”

Then I explain that just because my room doesn’t look like hers doesn’t mean I’m any less organized than she is, and didn’t she just lose her keys last week? But of course there’s nothing she can say to that because it’s true. She doesn’t even have anything on her walls except for this one artsy-looking black-and-white print of some courtyard in Paris. My walls are so covered with posters and photos and pictures I ripped out of magazines that you can barely see the dark red walls. And there’s like a million different flowers, because flowers are my thing. Flowers are everywhere: prints, pictures, my own artwork, postcards, even ones pressed in clear contact paper. And I have these sweet gel flowers on my window, and when sunshine filters through them it makes bright flower patterns on the walls. I can’t imagine having walls with nothing on them.

I’m tossing aside stuffed animals and sneakers and CDs and I go, “There’s a method to my madness. Just because you don’t see what I’m doing here doesn’t mean it’s not organized.”

And she’s all, “Oh, really?”

And I can tell by her tone she’s just playing, but I’m not in the mood for games. So I’m like, “Yeah. Everything’s—I can find anything. I know where everything is.” Okay, maybe except my iPod recharger cord, but that’s just one thing. That happens to everybody.

I guess Mom decides that we’ve connected enough for today, because she drifts off down the hall. My stress level begins its descent to normal.

But it’s not like I want to be organized like Rhiannon or anything. Because this one time when she was packing for sleepaway camp? She made a list of everything she needed to bring and stuff she still had to get. But it wasn’t just your average list. That list was on the way other end of the spectrum. She developed this whole color-coded system with all these complex classifications and footnotes, and even when Rhiannon makes a simple list it turns into a PhD thesis. And then she actually said how there was a reference guide for the color-coding, and even though it might have been a joke I was still scared.

My cell makes cricket-chirp sounds, and I go to my bag to take it out but it’s not there. But it sounds like it’s definitely in the area. So I start tearing through another laundry pile and papers and books, and I find it buried in my bag under my makeup case and this cardigan I have to keep in my bag because the computer lab at school is always freezing while the rest of the rooms are like a sauna. There’s a text message from Joni. It says:

Which confirms that the sad rumor about Steve and Gloria is a lie. It’s so obvious that Joni’s trying to instigate this whole big thing where I tell Ree what I heard, so that Ree ends up mad at me for not telling her when I first heard or for being the one to tell her or whatever other twisted plan Joni is cooking up. There’s some reason Joni wants me to be the one to tell Ree, and I’m not falling for it. If it’s true, and Joni wants Ree to know so badly, why hasn’t she told her by now? And why would she care if Ree knows or not?

Or it’s probably that Gloria’s doing this to get back at Ree and Joni is one of the few girls who are actually friends with Gloria (out of fear, I’m sure) so if I tell Ree, it’ll be exactly what Gloria wants me to do all according to her evil plan. And I’m nobody’s puppet.

I’m not going to let her get to me. And I’m not texting her back. I have better things to do with my time, thank you very much.

I grab my laptop and take it over to my bed. There’s something I want to check. Because I still feel jealous about last night and Danny strategizing to ask Marion out. So I get into Gmail and click on my Danny archive and look through all the subjects until I find it.

I remember when he sent me this back in January and how it was the best e-mail ever. Because around everyone else, he’s always all fired up about something and joking around and no one ever gets to see the sensitive side of Danny. Not the way I did.

But if what he wrote is true, which I totally think it is, then that means he still loves me. And if he still loves me . . . then how can he want someone else?

THERE’S SOME CHALK
dust on his left sock and I can’t stop staring at it. That chalk dust is so cute. All I want to do is go over and wipe that chalk dust off and be like, “You had some chalk dust on your sock.”

But of course I can’t do that. Then everyone would know.

Mr. Farrell is asking if anyone wants to put number thirty-two on the board. I look down at my homework to avoid eye contact so he won’t call on me, but I know he’s going to call on me. I can
feel
it.

And then he goes, “Nicole? Thanks.” As if I had volunteered or something.

So I take my homework pages up to the board and when I pass by Mr. Farrell sitting on top of his desk (which I think is so cute, by the way) my heart flutters around and it gets hard to breathe. Which is the same reaction I have every single time I get within ten feet of him.

I pick up the chalk and write “
32.)
” on the board and look at what I did for it on my homework and I have no idea how to do this problem. Over on the other side of the board, Jackson already has half his problem done. I wonder why his brain works differently from mine. Like, what is it about his brain that lets him get math?

I scratch the chalk over the board to create what I really hope even remotely resembles what this is supposed to look like.

He’s staring at me. I can feel it. But if I turn around to check, then he’ll know that I know. So I do a few more lines of the problem. But there’s no way I can fake my way through it, so I give up the charade that I’ll ever get this and put the chalk down.

And Mr. Farrell’s like, “Not so fast, Nicole.” And I love it when he says my name, because every time I hear it my heart does this little flip-flopping thing. I wish I were mad smart and he’d be all impressed and I could get the highest grade in the class and he’d fall in love with me and have to marry me, but I’m not that girl. You’re either smart or average or some early childhood trauma prevented you from developing necessary brain cells and I think we all know who we are by now. Not like I don’t have other talents he can easily discover.

So I tell him that I didn’t get this one and there’s no way I can finish it, and he says I need to at least try. Which I think is really interesting, because isn’t that what I’ve been doing this whole time? So I say that I
did
try and that’s why half the problem is on the board.

But he’s like, “You need to try harder.” Which is pretty much the biggest insult ever, because if he only knew how late I stay up doing his stupid homework every night and how many weekend hours I dedicate to these problems in some coffeehouse instead of doing something fun like spying on people’s conversations.

But apparently there’s something even more humiliating than that. Because right when the room’s all quiet and everyone is staring at me, waiting to see what I’ll do, Gloria goes, “Like she’s ever gonna get it.”

I cannot describe the degree of embarrassment I’m feeling at this second in time. It’s like every cell in my body is completely mortified.

There’s no way she just said that. Because if she just said that, then everyone heard it. Including Mr. Farrell. And now he’s giving her this harsh look and I can’t turn around and face everybody and I can’t do the problem but I can’t sit down. All I want to do is run out of the room. But I can’t do that either.