The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door (9 page)

CHAPTER

18

When I got home, I waved as I swept past Mom, who was talking on the phone, and went to my room. My heart was threatening to run away from my chest. Sandy was scheming to turn Drake against me, to take away the one thing I had going for me, that part was obvious. But what about Drake?

Was he naïve about the whole thing, innocently agreeing to partner with her in Spanish? People don’t generally lock arms with their Spanish partners. Drake would probably only be here a month, but maybe he still wanted cooler friends. Or, maybe now that things were over with Japhy, Drake was thinking about staying and finding a more promising social group. What if he was somewhere with her right now, telling her all about Japhy, coming out to her, bonding with her?

I paced back and forth in the only clean part of my room available for pacing. Three steps and turn, three steps and turn. I grabbed my backpack and snatched my notebook out of it, flopping down on my bed to write. I started scribbling down more forms of revenge, ignoring the pro and con columns.

“Celia?” Mom’s voice rang down the hall.

“Yeah?” I yelled back.

“Come and help me with dinner.”

“I’m busy right now,” I yelled.

“You’re going to help eat, so you need to help cook.”

I slammed my notebook shut and stalked out to the kitchen.

“Stir this gravy while I go turn the sprinkler off in the backyard. I forgot and left it on last night,” she said, holding the end of a wooden spoon over a saucepan.

“Big surprise,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

I took the spoon and stirred fast, tight circles through the thin gravy, splashing some onto the burner, which sizzled. A minute after my mom slid back the screen door and went into the backyard, the phone in the dining room rang. I jumped to get it, leaving the spoon to float in the gravy pan.

“Drake?”

“Um, Hello. Is . . . Gina there?” The voice sounded confused. It was the same man who called before.
Simon.

I glanced through the window into the backyard and saw my mom turning off the spigot attached to the garden hose. Then I dropped the receiver right back onto the hook.
Nice try, Simon.
I carefully removed the phone again to make sure I was getting a dial tone and then I rested it on one side of its cradle, so it would register as busy. I didn’t feel like hearing from Simon, or Drake for that matter.
If he likes Sandy Firestone so much, he can keep her,
I thought Darkly.

I closed the door to the dining room and rescued the gravy just as it started to burn. When my mom came back in through the screen door, I was stirring vigorously.

“Ground’s a little soggy, but we avoided a flood,” she said, pushing the hair away from her face with the back of her hands. “Did I hear the phone ring?”

“Yeah,” stir, stir, stir, “it was,” concoct a lie, “. . . my friend, Drake.”

“The new friend who’s a boy. Should I know more?”

“He’s a friend. It’s no big deal.”

My mom looked at me as she washed her hands in the kitchen sink. “I think friends are always a big deal,” she said. Since my mom started seeing her therapist in July, she says lots of dorky things like that.

× × ×

After dinner, I told my mom I had homework and went to my room to check email. She must have found the phone off the hook, because I heard her talking in the dining room. I hoped it wasn’t Simon telling her I hung up on him. There was nothing new in my in-box, so I was forced to distract myself with math. For over an hour, I lay on my bed with my mind shifting between math homework and revenge.

Had Sandy successfully won over Drake? What is the Pythagorean theorem? Was she ever going to get tired of trying to ruin my life? Draw an isosceles triangle. Would I ever come up with a good plan to ruin hers? How do you determine the diameter of a circle? Finally, I put my head down on my comforter and lost consciousness. I was lying there, still in my clothes on top of my bed, when a tap on my window startled me awake.

I sat up with a gasp and looked over to see a figure standing in our flower bed, looking in through the glass. It was Drake. The clock on my nightstand said 10:32. I rubbed my eyes as I got up from my bed.

“Do you know that murderers stand in flower beds and tap on windows?” I hissed, sliding open the window and talking to Drake through the screen.

“Zombies, too,” he answered, propping his forearms on the sill. “I called your phone two thousand times. Ever heard of call-waiting?”

“Mom doesn’t answer it,” I said, neglecting to mention the time the phone spent off the hook.

I looked at him standing carefully with one foot on either side of my mom’s chrysanthemums. I was feeling guarded because Drake had been with Sandy, talking about who knows what, but I was also excited to see him. I moved the screen, reached a hand through the window and helped him climb in.

“I didn’t want to knock this late because of your mom,” Drake said, flopping down on my bed once he was inside, “and I couldn’t wait until tomorrow.”

“Couldn’t wait?” Maybe he couldn’t wait to tell me that he made a new best friend named Sandy Firestone.

“I couldn’t wait to tell you about . . . this,” he said, reaching into his backpack and pulling out the red-and-white book he checked out of the library.

“You’re reading a book?” I asked with a profound lack of interest.

“Not just any book, Celia,” said Drake, lighting up like a summer firefly. “This book is life changing.”

I walked to the door and put my ear against it to listen for evidence that my mother might still be awake. With her wacky work hours, she didn’t have a usual bedtime. I wasn’t sure how much trouble I would get into for having a boy in my room this late. No boy had ever knocked on my window before, day or night.

I didn’t hear anything, so I walked back over to the bed, where Drake was holding the book. When I sat down, he handed it to me, its title splashed across the cover in metallic blue letters:
Dream It! Do It!
by Buddy Strong.

My mom got into self-help books last summer after my dad left, so I was used to “You can do it!” language, and had became increasingly allergic to the hyper-positivity of the genre. Around my house, I had found it difficult not to roll my eyes whenever I heard the word
intentionality
.

“When I first got back from New York, I was so depressed,” Drake said, taking off his sneakers and tossing them into the corner of the room where my shoes were already piled. “I felt like everything was over, like things were hopeless.”

“You mean yesterday?” Drake ignored my snarkiness. I turned the book over once and then tossed it onto the bed next to me.

“Yeah.” He gestured toward me like I had just made a good point. “Just yesterday I was being so negative and acting so defeated. I really took my eyes off the prize.” He crossed his legs and sat facing me. I didn’t face him back but sat awkwardly looking toward my computer. “I know this might seem really out there to you, all woo-woo and big city, but promise me you’ll be open-minded.”

“Do you think we country mice can’t get transcendent?” I said to my computer screen.

“What? No. Celia.” Drake took my hands and pulled my body around to face his. “I mean that I know this might sound stupid, but I really want to share it with you.”

It did soften my heart when Drake said he wanted to share something with me. Maybe the whole Sandy thing was meaningless. Maybe it was nothing but a Spanish project, and I was completely overreacting.

“This book is . . . I don’t know, it’s just, speaking to me,” Drake said, picking it up off the bed and turning it over a few times in his hands. “It’s like . . . it isn’t telling me anything I don’t know, but it’s saying it in a way that I can really
hear
it. Just listen to the introduction. Then you can decide if you want to do the exercises with me. Just promise me you will keep an open mind, okay?”

“Drake, I need to ask you something—” I couldn’t contain my curiosity about his time with Sandy any longer.

“I know, I know you have questions, but just let me read the introduction to you first. Please?”

“But there is something I need to know—”

“Just the introduction, that’s all I ask.”

Reluctantly, I adjusted myself to sit cross-legged across from him on the bed. Drake pulled open the cover on the book like he was opening a pharaoh’s tomb. I closed my eyes and tried to let my mind open, or whatever.

“Introduction: The Dream Is the Means and the End

“Too many of us spend our lives reacting to the circumstances and conditions life hands us, thinking the scope of our accomplishments is made possible by our external situation. Hi, I’m Buddy Strong, and in this book,
Dream It! Do It!
, I’ll show you how you can make your greatest Dreams manifest before your believing eyes! In the course of the next six chapters, you will learn how to identify your Dream, believe in it, and make it come true. Join me on this mystical, practical journey into creating the greatest life you could want for yourself. You can have anything you want when you Dream It!”

Drake raised his head and smiled. He looked like a kid at a magic show.

“Thoughts?” He closed the book.

What I thought is that it sounded exactly like the
Living through Life Changes
, and
Making the Most of Middle Age
, books my mom had on the coffee table. Still, Drake looked so happy compared with the past two days, and I really liked seeing him happy. “It sounds . . . cool,” I managed to say, despite my Darkness.

“Okay, I’m going to read more.” He looked back into the book and flipped forward a few pages. “This is the first activity.”

“No, wait. I really need to ask you something,” I interrupted forcefully, breaking Drake out of his spell.

“Okay. What?”

Now that I had his attention, I felt suddenly awkward and vulnerable. Asking about Sandy was going to make me sound possessive and clingy. I chickened out. “Did you do the science homework?”

“Yeah, while I was waiting for your phone to be unbusy. I’ll let you copy,” he said dismissively. “Now will you listen to this activity?”

I nodded.

“Chapter One: Saying It!

“If you want to Dream It and Do It, then the first step takes place on the feet of your tongue. Too many dreams are held back by negative self-talk. We fill up our conversations with reasons why things aren’t working. This first chapter helps you start telling yourself and others all the reasons why things will work!

“Before you can
visualize
your Dream, you have to
verbalize
your Dream. Our first activity is simple: state your Dream as clearly and boldly as you can. Do it out loud and do it LOUDLY.”

Drake looked up at me. “When I started reading
Dream It! Do It!
, I realized something powerful. I felt like things had gone horribly wrong with Japhy. But actually, he
kissed
me. That really happened. He’s probably just too scared to admit that he’s attracted to me, which is completely understandable in our homophobic culture.” Drake kept shifting around on the bed as he was talking. Then he stood up and walked over to the window. “A lot of people have a hard time coming out.”

I wanted to pay attention to Drake, his book, and his story about Japhy. But the Darkness was still having a carnival inside my nervous system. I couldn’t hold it in any longer.