The Sweetest Thing (2 page)

“What?” Meredith looked confused.

“Oh no, not again!” Judith cried. Suddenly a shocked, knowing expression crept over Meredith's face.

“Again, what?” I asked, looking back and forth between them, totally lost. The problem with becoming friends with two people who've known each forever is that I sometimes have no idea what they're talking about.

“Stop moving your head.” Monique steadied my half-styled head with one hand and brandished a pair of scissors in the other.

“Adam McGregor the football player?” asked Judith. “The Josh Hartnett lookalike with curly brown hair?”

Meredith nodded solemnly and covered her face with her hands in despair.

“That guy?” I laughed. “Meredith, he's in bio with me, and he's definitely not sensitive. He just sits in the back of the class with all his teammates, flicking pencils at one another. The last time the
teacher called on him, he was like, ‘Ummm … my concussion is acting up, can you repeat the question?'”

“Oh, that's not true at all. He's super smart and totally witty.” Judith kicked her legs under her black smock. “But that's not the problem.”

“The problem is …” Meredith began.

“We both like him!” they wailed in unison. Several people in the salon turned to look our way. The
New York Times Magazine
model clucked her tongue disapprovingly as she turned the page of the
W
she was reading.

I still felt confused. How could they both like him when this was the first time they'd ever mentioned him? “Are you sure?” I asked. “How well do you even know him?”

Meredith moaned, ignoring my question. “And the worst part is that this exact thing happened when we were in sixth grade. It was
awful
. We almost stopped being friends over it.”

Judith lowered her voice, even though her stylist had wandered off to find a wide-toothed comb and no one was really trying to overhear. “See, Meredith and I had this friend, Fiona, who lived in Park Slope, and during the summer we'd go out there to tan up on her roof. Fiona's brother was absolutely the cutest guy
we'd ever seen in our lives, and we were both totally, totally in love with him.”

Meredith pressed one hand to her heart over her black smock. “I still dream about him sometimes. Tall and handsome, with coal black, smoldering eyes.”

“He was a hunk,” Judith put in bluntly.

“Hunk?” I asked. Did anybody besides my mom still use that word?

“Yeah, totally. Anyway, all that summer, we competed over him—buying new swimsuits every week, wearing makeup over our suntan lotion, trying to talk to him, even.” She grinned, despite herself. “Back then we never, ever talked to the guys we liked.”

“Huh.” I suppressed a smile. Meredith and Judith still got serious cases of the giggles around boys, but I figured it was probably best to not point that out. Behind me Monique finally set down her scissors and picked up her blow-dryer. She turned it on low.

“It got kind of out of control,” Meredith went on. “Finally, one day, on the way over to their house, Judith said she was going to ask him out on a date, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. So I told her if she tried anything, I'd tell him she still slept with her blanky.”

“I can't believe you did that,” Judith broke in. I
couldn't tell if she was kidding or not—her voice was somewhere in between joking and serious.

“Anyhow,” Meredith continued, “by the time we got to Fiona's, we were both about to explode—which we did as soon as we saw Tony playing a video game in the living room. We just started screaming at each other in front of everyone. Tony hadn't known that we liked him, and I guess he was kind of freaked out, because he ran away and locked himself in his room.” Meredith looked over at me sheepishly. “He wouldn't come out till we went back to Manhattan. We never saw him again.”

“Wow.” It was kind of hard to imagine Meredith and Judith fighting. The whole time I'd known them, they'd been practically inseparable. But from the expressions on their faces, I could tell the Tony incident had been a huge deal.

“That's why we're never going to let that happen again.” Judith gave Meredith a sharp look that bordered on a glare. “No guy's worth
that
.”

“No, definitely not,” Meredith said emphatically. She twisted an orange bangle bracelet around her wrist. “We swore never to let another guy come between us.”

“Okay,” Monique cut in, “you're done!” I'd been so caught up listening to Judith and Meredith that I'd hardly paid attention to what Monique was doing to
my hair. But when I looked up and saw my reflection in the mirror, I let out a shriek.

It was like Monique had looked into the future and seen an older, cooler me. She'd moved my part to the left, and had cut sleek side-swept bangs across my forehead. She had kept my hair essentially the same length, but rather than just hanging straight across, it now hung in choppy layers around my shoulders. It looked amazing—sophisticated and stylish, and totally perfect for the new me.

Even though Meredith was probably right about boys never noticing haircuts, I still couldn't wait for Bennett to see it. He's really perceptive, and he'd spent so much time with me lately, I figured he'd have to notice right away … right?

Well, as I soon found out, that wasn't exactly true.

It may not be Nobu, but Stuyvesant's cafeteria is beautiful. It's more like a private dining room you'd find in a museum than in a regular high school, and you can see the Hudson River from all the windows. Meredith, Judith, and I eat lunch there almost every day. But that Monday Judith had a Debate Club prep session, and Meredith, who was working on costumes for the school's annual musical, had to go to a cast-and-crew pizza party behind the stage in the auditorium. It was actually the perfect day for them to be busy, though, because between getting my haircut and then showing it off to my family the night before and then staring at it in the mirror in my bathroom, I hadn't had time to finish reading my English assignment.

I was looking forward to finding a quiet table in the corner, but when I walked through the cafeteria doors,
the entire place was in an uproar. It was even more chaotic than on Falafel Day. Cheerful, football-themed decorations hung from every surface in the room. The coffered ceiling was covered with big loops of crepe paper in red and blue—the team colors—and an enormous inflatable football was suspended over the food line. A giant full-color poster plastered on the far wall advertised the big football game against Brooklyn Tech on Saturday at the Columbia University stadium, while a bunch of smaller ones reminded students about the pep rally that afternoon. I'd completely forgotten about the rally. I've never been a big fan of school sports—I played volleyball in seventh grade, but that was because we didn't have to take gym if we did an extracurricular. Plus, Mallard Day didn't really have sports teams that were competitive with other schools. So the crazy excitement sweeping through Stuy was a new thing for me.

After getting my food—a cucumber-and-hummus sandwich with a bottle of green tea—I shouldered past a bunch of girls wearing cheerleading outfits and found a table over by the window. I should have been reading my English assignment as I munched on my sandwich and sipped my tea, but instead I looked out over the water. I couldn't help but worry about what Meredith and Judith had said about Adam yesterday.
Even though they said they would never let a boy come between them again, how would they be able to forget about Adam when the whole school seemed to have football fever? Adam was probably one of those guys who relished having girls fall all over him so he could brag about it to his teammates. It would never even occur to him that there were real friendships at stake. I mean, I really had seen him in class, and he just wasn't a cool guy at all.

Just then, Adam McGregor and his football buddies burst into the cafeteria, wearing white button-down shirts and matching red-and-blue striped ties. Now even if I had wanted to finish my homework rather than ruminate about Adam and his cocky ways, I wouldn't have been able to. Because the minute the football players ran in, about half the lunchroom jumped up and cheered. The boys grinned like crazy as they went through the food line, piling their trays full of carbs and electric blue Gatorade.

I shook my head in disbelief. This was New York, cultural center of the world, home of the Met and the Guggenheim. Getting riled up about the Yankees is one thing, but this was
high school
football. Who did these guys think they were?

Sure, some of them weren't terrible looking. I mean, it wasn't like they were mathletes, so they were
all in pretty good shape, if a little bulked up for my taste. And yeah, Adam had the sort of clean-cut, all-American look you might see in a J. Crew catalog. But it didn't seem right that the school rearranged classes to worship football players at a pep rally when people like Bennett, who worked on the school paper, barely got to use the Xerox machine.

It was just my luck that, of all the tables still open, Adam and his friends decided to take over the one next to mine. As they clattered trays down one after the other and punched one another in the shoulder, I sighed and decided that I, for one, wasn't going to pay them any attention. I pulled my English textbook out of my bag and opened it to the section we were going to have a quiz on next period, a short story from forever ago by this guy named O. Henry, like the candy bar. Maybe he was some eccentric chocolate tycoon like Willy Wonka who wrote in his spare time.

I sighed again and, forcing myself to ignore the hoots and backslaps coming from the next table, started to read. The story was called “The Gift of the Magi,” and it turned out to be about a young married couple living in the city who were too poor to buy each other Christmas presents. I tried to get into it, but when I reached the bottom of the first page, I
realized I wasn't really paying attention to the words in front of me.

Adam and his teammates kept laughing and shouting to one another, and I was getting more and more annoyed. How rude was it to come into a public place like this and treat it like your own private VIP room? Maybe they all had concussions or whatever, but some of us had to study.

I guess I had been shooting Adam quite a few annoyed glances, because after a couple of minutes, I noticed he was looking my way. I quickly stared down at my book and tried to hide my irritated expression, but it was too late. When I slowly raised my eyes again, he was already standing up and coming over toward me.

Adam is about six foot three, with an athletic build. I'd always thought big guys like him were plodding and clumsy. But the way he skirted through the maze of scratched-up wooden chairs as he walked toward me made him seem almost like an acrobat or gymnast. Still, I wasn't overly impressed. He was that generic type of good looking, with no personality in his face, nothing cool and quirky and unique like Bennett, or even my old boyfriend Jonathan. And I totally disagreed with Judith—he didn't look a thing like Josh Hartnett, unless you counted the broad shoulders.
Which I didn't. When he reached my table, he smiled and pulled out a chair across from me, then sat down on the very edge, like he was only going to stay for a second.

“Sorry about the noise,” he said, in that low, clear voice Meredith had thought was so perfect for reading poetry. He nodded at my English textbook. “It must be annoying if you're trying to study. We're just excited to kick off the season. I hope you can forgive us.”

“Well, it's just—” But as I looked at his good-natured grin, I could feel my irritation begin to melt away. I wanted to say,
Yes, you're being ridiculously loud
, but somehow what came out of my mouth was, “Oh, it's fine. Don't worry about it.”

“What's that you're reading?” As he reached across the table to grab my book, I noticed he was wearing a vintage, blue-faced Breitling watch, kind of like the one my brother's crazy friend Mickey Pardo always wears. It was surprising, because I'd pegged him as a run-of-the-mill Hilfiger or Fossil kind of guy.

“Just a short story for English class next period.” I hoped he would get the hint from my short answer that I wanted my book back.

“I'm in Welninski's section,” he said, completely oblivious to my desire for him to leave. His nose crinkled as he glanced at the first page of the O. Henry
story. “We started off with the poetry unit, but I read ahead a little.” He tapped the page with one finger. “I liked this story.”

“You did?” A football player reading ahead?

“Sure. O. Henry's stuff is pretty entertaining. He's no Hemingway, but his endings are great. They're always a little twisted. You finish this one yet?”

“We're having a quiz on it today, and I didn't really get a chance to study,” I admitted. “I was working on the bio worksheets all night.” Someone on the food line dropped a ceramic bowl with a clatter. Several people stood up and clapped as the red-faced girl bent to gather the broken shards.

“Don't remind me.” Adam rolled his eyes, and I noticed that Meredith had been wrong. There in the sunlight, I could see that his eyes weren't silver moons, like she'd said. They were green, and if I were being poetic and flowery like her, I might've even said they were chartreuse, the same color as my warmest, fuzziest cardigan sweater.

“That class is impossible.” Adam ran his finger along a wide groove in the wooden table and looked at me earnestly. “I don't know how I'm going to survive the semester. I can barely stay on top of all the reading, let alone understand it. Mitochondria, chlorophyll—it's like learning another language.”

“It's confusing at first, but if you have someone explain it well, it's actually kind of easy,” I remarked, thinking of Bennett and his helpful flash cards.