The Boy Next Door (14 page)
Authors: Meg Cabot
To: Dolly Vargas
From: Nadine Wilcock
Subject: Mel
All right, you guys, you’ve heard the hype; now let’s see if he lives up to it. The place is Fresche. The time is nine o’clock. Be there, or tomorrow at the water cooler you won’t know what the rest of us are talking about.
Nad
To: Max Friedlander
From: John Trent
Subject: New York Journal
All right, tell me, and tell me quick:
Who do you know from the
New York Journal
?
I want names, Friedlander. I want a list of names, and I want it NOW.
John
To: John Trent
From: Max Friedlander
Subject: New York Journal
So, you’re stooping to speak to me again, I see. Not so high and mighty now, are you? I thought I’d mortally
offended
you with my thoughtfully crafted precepts on womankind.
I knew you’d come crawling back.
So what is this you want to know? Do I know anyone at the
New York Journal
? What are you, nuts? You’re the only journalist I hang out with. I can’t stand those pseudo-intellectual phonies. Think they’re so great just because they string a few words together to form a sentence.
Why do you want to know anyway?
Hey, Trent, you aren’t actually going out in public pretending to be me, are you? I mean, you’re just doing the whole impersonation within my aunt’s building, right? With that chick who was so mad about having to walk the dog?
Right?
RIGHT???
Max
To: John Trent
From: Max Friedlander
Subject: New York Journal
Wait, I forgot. I do know this one babe. Dolly something. I think she’s with the
Journal
. You’re not meeting
her
, are you?
Max
To: John Trent
From: Genevieve Randolph Trent
Subject: Miss Fuller
Dearest John,
Well, well, well. A
gossip
columnist, no less. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I was thinking at worst she’d turn out to be a “grad” student. You know, one of those horrid longhaired girls you see sometimes in Central Park, reading Proust on a park bench with the sandals and the glasses and the “backpacks.”
But a
gossip columnist
. Now really, John. What can you be thinking?
Did you think I wouldn’t find out? More fool you! It was easy. A simple phone call to the Fullers of Lansing, Illinois. I pretended I was one of those family-tree tracers. You know, a Fuller from way back when the Mayflower landed. Oh, they were just so eager to tell me all about the farm and their precious little Melissa, who’s moved to the big city, dontcha know. And not just any big city, either, but the biggest one in the whole world, Noo York City.
Honestly, John.
Well, you’d better bring her around so we can all get a look at her. Next week would be fine. After the benefit, though, John. I am really quite solidly booked until then.
All my love,
Mim
From: Jason Trent
Subject: Mim
Just a heads up to let you know Mim’s on the warpath about you missing the dedication.
Plus, although I don’t know this for certain, she seems to have found out about the redhead.
Don’t look at me. I didn’t tell her. I still think you’re out of your mind to have agreed to this thing in the first place.
Stacy, on the other hand, wants to know whether or not you took her advice.
Jason
P.S.: Saw on the news about the sinkhole in front of your office building. My sympathies on the whole toilet situation.
P.P.S.: I’m sorry I called you a psychotic freak. Even though you are one.
P.P.P.S.: Forgot to tell you: Because of all this, Stacy has gotten her own e-mail account. She got tired of sharing mine. Her new address is [email protected].
To: Jason Trent
From: John Trent
Subject: You can call me…
anything you want. I don’t mind.
And don’t worry about Mim. I don’t mind about that either.
And I kind of like that sinkhole. I have a genuine affection for it. In fact, I’ll be sad when they finally fill it in.
Oops, there’s just been a triple stabbing in Inwood. Gotta go.
John
To: Stacy Trent
From: Jason Trent
Subject: John
Stace—
Something is wrong with John. I called him a psychotic freak last week, and he doesn’t even care. Plus I warned him about Mim, and he said he doesn’t care about that either!
He doesn’t even care about the sinkhole and the fact that there are no working toilets in his office building.
This happened to my cousin Bill that time he swallowed the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila down in Mexico. He had to spend a month in rehab!
What should we do?
Jason
To: Jason Trent
From: Stacy Trent
Subject: John
Jason—
Before you have your poor brother hauled off to Bellevue, let me
see if I can get anything out of him. He might be more willing to open up to me, seeing as how I don’t go around calling him names.
Kisses,
Stacy
To: John Trent
From: Stacy Trent
Subject: You took my advice, didn’t you?
Don’t deny it. You called her. So spill.
And don’t leave anything out. I am thirty-four years old, which puts me, as a woman, at my sexual peak. I am also so pregnant I haven’t seen my own feet in weeks. The only way I can have sex is vicariously.
So start tapping on that keyboard, monkey boy.
Stacy
To: Stacy Trent
From: John Trent
Subject: Monkey boy responds
You sure do talk racy for a full-time housewife and mother of two (and a half). Do the other mommies on the PTA have their minds in the gutter, too? That must make for some interesting bake sales.
For your information, what you are assuming has happened has not.
And if things continue in the manner they have been, it never will, either.
I don’t know what it is about this girl. I know I am not the most debonair of men. I don’t think anyone who has ever met me would classify me as a playboy. But nor have I ever been accused of being a complete imbecile.
And yet when I’m around Mel, that’s exactly how I end up looking—probably out of divine punishment for the fact that, since I met her, I’ve done pretty much nothing but lie to her.
Whatever it is, I cannot seem to pull off something as simple as
dinner
between the two of us. As you know, my first attempt ended with us eating pizza standing up (and her paying for her own slice).
My second attempt was even worse: We spent most of the evening in an
animal
hospital. And then I very suavely added insult to injury by sexually harassing her on Max Friedlander’s aunt’s couch. She fled, in romance-novel vernacular, like a startled fawn. As well she should have: I’m sure I must have seemed like a teenager in postprom heat.
Is this satisfying your wish to live vicariously through my romantic adventures, Stacy? Are those toes you haven’t seen in so long curling with excitement?
I almost broke down and told her after the couch incident. I wish to God now that I had. Things have only gone from bad to worse.
Because every day that I don’t tell her is just another day she’s going to hate me, when she finally figures it out.
And she
will
figure it out. I mean, one of these days, my luck is going to run out, and someone who knows Max Friedlander is going to tell her I’m not he, and she’s not going to understand when I try to explain, because it’s all so utterly juvenile, and she’s going to hate me, and my life is going to be over.
Because for some unfathomable reason, instead of reviling me, like any woman in her right mind would, Mel seems actually to
like
me. I cannot for the life of me figure out why. I mean, you
would think that, considering what she knows of me—or Max Friedlander, I should say—she’d hate my guts.
But, no. On the contrary: Mel laughs at my inane jokes. Mel listens to my asinine stories. And she apparently talks about me to her friends and colleagues, because a group of them demanded to meet me.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking,
Why on earth did he go?
And I can’t tell you why I went. When she asked me about it, it was in front of my office building, where she seemed to appear as if from nowhere. I was so shocked to see her—so scared someone was going to call me by my name—that I think I froze, even though it was about 80 degrees outside. The sun was shining, and there was noise and confusion everywhere, and suddenly, she was just there, with her hair shining all around her head like a halo, and her big blue eyes blinking up at me. I think I would have said yes if she’d asked me to eat glass out of the palm of her hand.
And then there was nothing I could do about it. I mean, I had already said yes. I couldn’t cancel on her.
So I ran around in a panic, trying to figure out if Max knew anybody at the
Journal.
Then I went and I met them and they were suspicious, but for Mel they pretended not to be, since she is clearly someone they adore. By the end of the evening, we were all the best of friends.
But only because the one woman who actually knows Max didn’t show up.
I didn’t find that out, of course, until I got there, and Mel said, “Oh, Dolly Vargas—you know Dolly—she couldn’t make it, on account of how she’s got ballet tickets tonight. But she says hi.”
See? See how close I came? It’s only a matter of time.
So what do I do? If I tell her, she’ll hate me, and I’ll never see her again. If I don’t tell her, eventually she’ll find out, and then she’ll hate me, and I’ll never see her again.
After her friends had left, Mel proposed we walk a bit before catching a cab back to our building. We walked along Tenth Street,
which, if you’ll remember from before you and Jason fled for the suburbs, is a shady residential street, filled with old brownstones, the front windows of which are always lit up at night, so you can see the people inside, reading or watching television or doing whatever it is people do in their homes after dark.
And as we walked, she took my hand, and we just strolled along like that, and as we strolled, I was struck by this horrible realization: that
never in my life
had I walked along the street holding a girl’s hand and felt like I did then…which was happy.
And that’s because every other time a girl has grabbed my hand, it’s been to drag me toward a store window so she could point to something she wanted me to buy her.
Every other time
.
I know it sounds horrible, like I’m feeling sorry for myself, or whatever, but I’m not. I’m just telling you the truth.
That’s actually the horrible part, Stace. That it’s true.
And now I’m supposed to tell her? Tell her who I am?
I don’t think I can.
Could you?
John
To: Jason Trent
From: Stacy Trent
Subject: John
There’s nothing wrong with your brother, silly. He’s in love, that’s all.
Stacy
P.S.: We’re out of Cheerios. Can you pick up a box on the way home tonight?
To: Stacy Trent
From: Jason Trent
Subject: My brother
John? In love? With whom? The redhead?
BUT SHE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HIS REAL NAME!!!
And this is all right with you???
Has everyone in this family gone completely mental?
Jason
To: Nadine Wilcock
From: Mel Fuller
Subject: Tell me again
Come on. Just one more time.
Mel
To: Mel Fuller
From: Nadine Wilcock
Subject: No
I will not.
Nad
To: Nadine Wilcock
From: Mel Fuller
Subject: Come on
Tell me. You know you want to. You OWE it to me.
Mel
To: Mel Fuller
From: Nadine Wilcock
Subject: God, you are a weirdo,
and you are really starting to annoy me. But all right, I’ll tell you. But this is the last time.
Okay. Here we go.
You are right. Max Friedlander is very nice. We were all wrong about him. I apologize. I owe you a Frappuccino.
Satisfied?
Nad
To: Nadine Wilcock
From: Mel Fuller
Subject: A grande,
with skim milk. Don’t forget.
Mel
P.S.: Don’t you just love the way the skin at the corners of his eyes all crinkles up when he smiles? Like a young Robert Redford?