Take Me There (9 page)

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Oh.” Steve went back to reading.

“Wait!”

“What?”

“You can’t just say something like that and not tell me why you’re asking.”

“There’s no reason. It just came into my head.”

“It just came into your head?”

“Yeah.”

“From where?”

“Dude. You’re being irrational.”

“How is that being irrational?”

“You can’t ask me where it came from. It’s impossible to know.”

I scrunched up my face like,
Do you even hear yourself when you talk?

Steve closed the book. “You always say you want me to tell you what I’m thinking, right?”

I pressed the fish sequin over the journal.

“Yeah.”

“So I’m telling you. You can’t get mad at me.” Steve sat up and rubbed my back. “I’m only doing what you wanted.”

Which I guess in a way was true. But there was obviously more to it. And he just didn’t want to tell me.

So now I know I have to be more spontaneous and exciting. Or that I already am, but I need to prove it.

Question: Does it still count as spontaneous if you plan what you’re going to do before you do it?

Steve is the only person I know who loves chemistry. So there’s no way my plan won’t get his attention.

I’m all about the pheromones when I’m going out with a boy. Like how Steve would sometimes let me borrow his shirt after he took it off. Then I would keep it under my pillow for a week. It would still smell like him that whole time. I loved breathing him in all night.

In the chem section of the library, I find a humungous college textbook called
Pheromone Biochemistry
. I lug it over to a table. I’m practically the only one in here, so I don’t have to worry about anyone seeing.

I look up
moths
in the index. There’s something about them on page 533.

There’s this saying that goes something like, “I’m drawn to you like a moth to a flame.” That’s how I feel about Steve. There’s always been this pull between us, like I couldn’t turn away even if I wanted to. I happen to know that moths are all about the pheromones, too. I saw it on the Discovery Channel.

I open my journal for random things and take some notes.

It all means nothing now. But by tomorrow, it will mean everything.

Nicole’s like, “So . . . we’re doing this?”

I think about it. After what Nicole just told me, this could be really embarrassing. Plus, I could get in so much trouble for doing this if anyone figures out it was me. But I want to do it anyway. I want to take that risk.

“Yeah,” I decide. “We are.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

There’s a courtyard area in front of our school that’s not too close to the sidewalk, but far enough away from the front doors for people to notice. I take out the two packs of sidewalk chalk and rip them open.

“The flashlight’s in here somewhere,” Nicole promises. She’s rummaging through her bag. “Could it
be
any darker?”

“Your bag is like the Bermuda Triangle.”

“At least that explains why my history homework’s missing.” She finally digs the flashlight out of her bag. She glances around nervously.

“Don’t worry.” This block of West Tenth Street is pretty quiet at night. It’s basically all residential except for our school.

“So how are we doing this?” she whispers.

“Okay.” I take out the folded paper. “I think I should outline the letters first, and then you can color them in.”

“Do you want patterns or solids?”

“Um . . .” If I were Steve and I was looking at a huge sidewalk-chalk message for me that took up the whole space in front of the school and everyone was going to see it, would I want the letters to have patterns or would I like it better if they were just colored in? “Maybe solid colors? That way after everyone walks on it, you’ll still be able to see what it says.”

“True. What colors do you want?”

“Whatever you think looks good.” I survey the area. If we start over near the flowerbed and go all the way to right before the grass . . . and if we make each letter about two feet high . . .

I bend down with a pink chalk stick and start the first letter, which is tricky because it’s an
S
. Those are always the hardest to draw in block letters.

Nicole holds the flashlight over me, because the streetlamps are too far away to see here. When she starts filling in his name, she puts the flashlight on the ground and angles it so we can both see. At first it’s hard to keep the letters straight, but then I get the hang of it.

An old guy walking his minuscule dog stops to see what we’re doing.

“We go here,” Nicole tells him. “It’s for a project.”

“Oh,” he gravels in his deep voice. “How nice.”

I keep writing. Nicole keeps coloring.

A few minutes later, I look over my shoulder to make sure he’s gone. But he’s still there. Watching. As if this is performance art or something.

I’m like, “But it’s not done and . . . we’re not allowed to have anyone see it yet.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well, I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow, then.”

“Pretty much,” Nicole goes. “Sorry.”

“Come on, Bear,” he tells his dog. The dog’s paws click away on the sidewalk, fading out.

I imagine what tomorrow morning will be like. The knots in my stomach tighten. What will everyone say? What will Steve tell everyone? Will he try to find out what it means before he comes to find me? Or will he come right up to me and say he’s sorry for everything and he doesn’t know what he was thinking and can I ever forgive him for being such an idiot?

When we’re done, we look over our work. It says:

Not even Steve will know what it means at first. But he’ll know who it’s from. And it will be the perfect way to make him see that I can do unexpected things. Because there’s no way that anyone would expect something like this.

Tomorrow will probably be the most humiliating day of my life. But when it’s over, Steve and I will be back together. And that makes everything worth it.

SO HERE’S WHAT
happened.

Danny was my boyfriend. He was sweet and funny and cute and he totally adored me. And that’s why I had to break up with him.

I’m the kind of girl who gets noticed all the time. Which you’d realize is so ironic if you knew me, because I’d rather be the one watching than the one being watched. But the reason I get noticed is because supposedly I have this in-your-face wild-style thing going on, even though I don’t think there’s anything wild about it. Just your average graphic tanks and spiked belts and cropped vintage tees and funky jewelry and fishnets with combat boots, that sort of thing. Oh, and I have a nose ring, but technically it’s just this small diamond stud that you can hardly see unless you get really close to me. Which I don’t exactly invite a lot of people to do.

So most people assume I’m wild like my style, which isn’t even that wild in the first place (like,
hello
, it’s called the East Village, you might want to check it out sometime), but I’m really not. Just because a person chooses to express themselves in an extreme way doesn’t mean they have an extreme personality. I’m just making a statement. It’s not some rage against the machine, down with the man type deal. Plus, it’s this whole new thing with me. I just put my wardrobe together last September and came back to school all different. I guess you could say I needed a change.

Anyway. Danny was my first real boyfriend. The thing with Jared doesn’t count because he was only trying to score. So when Danny not only noticed me but also asked me out, I was like, “What’s wrong with you?” Because normally people look at me but they don’t exactly talk to me. They just kind of sneak looks like I can’t tell they’re gawking, or they get shocked into silence, depending on the person. But Danny was like, “Nothing.” And I believed him because he was Danny.

He just came right up to me with his cute smile and customized Vans, which is the ultimate skater-boy sneaker that gets me every time, and his yellow rubber bracelet that says MOMENT OF ZEN and his radical attitude and picked me to be with out of everyone else. Maybe he thought my clothes matched his political fanaticism.

And it was great at first. But then there was that night. So I had to break up with him. I couldn’t deal with it then and I still can’t deal with it now and that’s just the way it is.

Yeah. You know what? The whole thing is way too complicated to even get into here.

So I’m in my room listening to
X & Y
and ignoring Mom yelling how if I don’t clean my closet I can’t go out tonight and consulting the latest entries in my spy notebook. I’ve had one of these since fourth grade when I fell in love with
Harriet the Spy
and wanted to be her more than anyone else in the whole entire world. And I still have spy notebooks, because it’s this thing I do to get plot ideas for the screenplay I’m writing. I spy on random strangers and kids at school all the time for ideas, and they don’t even know it. No one knows about my notebook except for Rhiannon. Well yeah okay and I told Danny, but I’m sure he probably forgot by now. Who remembers everything about somebody?

My ultimate goal is to be a film director, but writing screenplays is an excellent way to get noticed in the indie world. I love being in control of everything that happens, like being the one to decide who gets a happy ending. It would be so kickass if I turned out to be like Todd Solondz (
Welcome to the Dollhouse
,
Happiness
) or Alexander Payne (
About Schmidt
,
Election
), who are, like, the ultimate mega gurus of film. And not to toot my own horn, but I have an amazing eye for detail, which is critical in this business. Like with Mike White? I totally noticed that he wrote
The Good Girl
(which is one of my all-time faves and if you haven’t seen it, there is just no excuse for that kind of behavior) and that he was also a writer for season one of
Dawson’s Creek
. But that’s not the detail. The detail is that he had this almost identical line in both of them. Something about “going to the grave with unlived lives in your veins.” I’m sure there was me and like two other people in the world who noticed that.