Vegan Virgin Valentine (18 page)

“You mean the noncigarette variety?”

V nodded. “It’s something I got into in San Diego, but I’ve been cutting back a lot recently. I haven’t touched it since before the play. I’m just glad G-ma and G-pa never found out. Sometimes you need to have people who only see the good in you.”

We walked by an empty row of teeter-totters, half teetering, half tottering.

“Well, thank you, too, then,” I said.

“Me? Why?”

“For not telling my parents about … about how I’ve been falling in love.”

V stopped walking and turned to me. “So I was right?”

I smiled. “Yeah … you were right.”

“Who is it? I’m assuming it’s not Bethany because she’s together with Keith … hold on!” V stabbed her stick into the grass. “It’s the guy from Common Grounds! James, right?”

I stared at her. “How did you know?”

“Remember how you didn’t want me to work at Common Grounds because you said it was your place?”

I nodded.

“And remember that time when you were sick and he called and you didn’t want to talk to him?”

I nodded again.

“Being Aimee’s daughter,” V said, “you get pretty good at detecting when there’s something going on.”

As we started walking again, V asked, “Is it serious?”

“Yeah,” I said warily.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to ask if you’ve done it yet.”

I had to laugh.

We reached the tall swings. I sat down on one and pushed with my feet. V flopped onto the one next to me and scratched her stick into the gravel. As I swung past her, I glanced down to see what she was writing. I was surprised to see the words
RIP Stonah Babe.

“Hey! That’s just like…”

“Just like what?” V asked.

“Never mind,” I said.

“You mean the graffiti on the bathroom walls at school?”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Of course I’ve seen it,” V said. “I wrote it.”

I scuffed my flip-flops into the gravel until my swing came to a stop. “You
what
?”

“That’s what some kids in San Diego called me.
Stonah babe.
”

“What about
skanky ho
?”

V laughed as she tossed her stick into the grass. “Nope … never been called that. But you have to admit, it’s pretty funny.”

“Okay, I’m totally confused.
You
wrote all that graffiti?”

V twisted around in her swing several times and then let go, spinning and spinning and spinning. Finally, when she stopped, she said, “You’re probably going to think this is totally fucked up, but I’ve done that whenever I’ve started at a new school.”

“You write things about yourself on bathroom walls?”

V nodded.

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ve never been the new kid. I have … almost twenty times. And I’ve learned that if you just go with the flow, everyone ignores you and life sucks. But if you make yourself
known
, even for bad stuff, at least things get interesting and guys flirt with you and stoners invite you to hang out with them. Sometimes it backfires and people give you hell, but you won’t be there forever, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“How did it work out here?”

“At first, it was fine. Same as usual. But then I got into the play and things started changing. And then someone went around and scribbled out all the graffiti.”

“That would be me.”

V gaped at me. “
You
were the one? Why?”

I shook my head. We started swinging slowly, kicking our heels into the gravel.

“Sometimes it’s scary,” V said after a moment.

“What?”

“Having a good reputation. Like once you start doing things well, everyone expects more from you.”

I nodded, thinking basically about my whole life.

“But I guess it’s better than no one expecting anything at all,” V said.

Actually
, I thought,
that sounds very tempting.

After a minute I asked, “Do you ever think about Baxter?”

“Baxter Valentine?”

“Yeah … how he makes all those animal noises, like he doesn’t even care that everyone thinks he’s a freak. It just seems kind of liberating.”

V laughed. “I can honestly say I’ve never envied Baxter.”

She started pumping her legs, getting some serious elevation. It took me several kicks to catch up with her, but soon we were knee and knee, elbow and elbow. V looked over at me, this maniacal grin on her face, and went, “Woof!”

I laughed so hard I had to clutch the chains to keep from falling off my swing. But when I caught back up with her, I went, “Moooooo!”

“Cock-a-doodle-doooooooo!” she screamed.

“Meeoooooooooooow!”

“Hee-haaaaw! Hee-haaaaw!”

As we heaved our bodies forward and bellowed a barnyard of noises, I never once looked around to see if anyone else was in the playground. It was wildly fun, not to mention the most insane thing I’ve ever done in my life.

The following Saturday, V took the SATs and I dropped out of the Johns Hopkins precollege summer program. It had been building up for a while. First of all, I could never seem to pick my classes. And then, once the weather warmed up, all the seniors began counting down until graduation. But I was having a converse reaction. For me, time couldn’t go slowly enough. Every day that passed was a day closer to when I had to say goodbye to James.

The previous week, I’d e-mailed the director of the summer program, asking if I could have a few extra days to send in my course selections. An hour later, I got an e-mail from her assistant, Thomas, saying I could have another week. Before I could stop myself, I wrote back to him and asked what would happen if I dropped out. Two minutes later, a message popped into my box, saying that if I let them know by June fifth, I’d get a 90 percent refund on my tuition.

So there it was. My get-out-of-jail-almost-free card.

I drove V over to the high school for the SATs. It was a sunny morning and she had said she wanted to walk, so my parents plied her with a hearty breakfast, wished her luck, and headed up to Wegmans to do a big shop. But as soon as they were gone, V ran into the bathroom, clutching her stomach.

“Are you okay?” I said, standing outside the closed door.

“I feel nauseous,” she said in this small voice.

“Want some water?”

“No … I’ll be okay.”

When she came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, she was still pale. She glanced at the clock. “I’d better get going … I don’t have a lot of time now.”

“Want me to drive you?” I asked.

“Do you mind?”

“No … not at all.”

We didn’t say much on the car ride over. I tried to get V talking about non-SAT-related things, but she just stared out the window. We were trapped behind a slow-moving tractor, so I looked at the red and yellow tulips, thinking how they’ve come later than usual this year. V was massaging her stomach with her right hand. On her left hand, I noticed she’d written
relax, relax, relax, relax
down each finger, and then on her thumb it said
VVV.

“You’re going to be fine,” I said.

She nodded absentmindedly.

“Think how well you did in the practice tests.”

“But this is the real thing.”

“You can always retake the SATs in the fall if you’re not happy with your score.”

“But everything goes on my record, so it’s better if I do well the first time around.”

I looked over at V. She was sounding scarily like me, and I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way.

After I dropped her off, I called James from my cell phone and asked if he wanted to go to Northampton Park. That’s a park outside of Brockport with picnic areas and sledding hills and hiking trails. He said he’d taken the morning off from Common Grounds to do his laundry but was currently standing in front of his window, staring at the cloudless sky. I told him I’d be right over.

It was still early, so Northampton Park was relatively empty. I pulled into a parking lot, locked the car, and we held hands as we walked down this narrow horse trail. After a few minutes, James pointed out a little meadow, almost completely hidden by trees.

“Want to go in?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said, stepping off the trail.

We lay in the poky grass for several minutes, looking up at the infinite sky, my head resting on his shoulder. The sun was getting hot, so I lifted up my shirt and tucked it into the bottom of my bra.

“I feel like we’re camping,” James said.

“I know… It’s so quiet.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun to go camping this summer? Just you and me, somewhere in the Adirondacks.”

“I wish.”

“I know … I keep trying to pretend you’re not leaving.”

“What if I didn’t go?”

James turned his face toward me. “Not go to Johns Hopkins?”

I nodded.

“But haven’t you already matriculated?”

I told James how they could refund most of the tuition and I’d pay my parents the difference with money I’d saved from working at Common Grounds.

“You haven’t talked about this with your parents?”

“Not yet.” Then I laughed and said, “If I dropped out, I’d obviously have to tell them before we packed the car for Baltimore.”

James was quiet for a moment. “What made you change your mind?”

“I just don’t see why I’ve been so hung up on entering college as a second-year student. What’s the rush to skip over my freshman year?” I snuggled closer to him. “And, besides … I want to spend the summer together.”

James leaned down and kissed my stomach, now toasty from the sunshine. “Mara Elizabeth,” he said, “I would love nothing more than that, but you have to do what feels best for you.”

We started kissing. After a few minutes, I rolled over, so I was on top of him. He held on to my hips and we started moving our bodies together and I thought,
This is what feels best for me. Not in a year, not in ten years, but right here, right now, right in this moment.

Later that afternoon, I wrote an e-mail to Thomas at Johns Hopkins saying I was sorry but I wasn’t going to be attending summer school after all.

Then I clicked “send” and bought back two months of my life.

Senior year was winding down. Even though teachers were continually expressing the importance of final-exam preparation, everyone knew that GPAs had already been tallied, so nothing we did now mattered in the slightest. In the hallways and even in classes, there were only five subjects that seniors were concentrating on:

1. The prom, in the broad sense, like who’s going with whom and where people bought their dresses.
   

2. The prom, in the narrow sense, like who’s going with whom but is
   really
   hoping to hook up with a different whom.
   

3. Partying
   before
   the prom.
   

4. Partying
   after
   the prom.
   

5. Graduation parties and other reasons to drink this summer.
   

Despite the dozens of hours I’d put into planning “End of the Road,” I wasn’t going to go. The only person I wanted to dance with was James, and I couldn’t imagine dragging him to a high-school prom. V actually got two invitations—from Brandon Parker and T.J. Zuckerman—and turned them both down. She later told me that Brandon would just want to get stoned the whole time and T.J. had been trying to find an excuse to sleep with her since
Damn Yankees
, and, truthfully, she’d rather stay home and watch a movie.

I spent the morning of the prom decorating the ballroom at the college with streamers and balloons and hand-painted road signs, courtesy of the Art Club. Bethany went to the prom with Keith. When I called her the next day to ask how it went, she said the only big news was that Ash and Travis both ditched their dates and made out under the
MERGE
sign for the entire evening. Bethany said that despite the extreme public display of affection, it was a relief to have Ash doing something other than gossiping about everyone else’s business.

A week after the prom, “Breaking Out” arrived at the high school in a massive shipment of boxes. We had a celebratory pizza party in the yearbook office. I ate two slices, a cheese and a veggie supreme, and savored every single bite. We passed around our yearbooks and a bunch of pens. Everyone wanted me to sign on the “Class Personalities” page where Travis and I were voted “Most Likely to Succeed” because, as they said, my signature might be worth cash someday.

It was weird, the whole “Most Likely to Succeed” thing. I remember being thrilled about it last fall, when Travis and I posed for the camera. He clutched a massive wad of Monopoly money, and I held up a piece of paper that said
NEXT STOP, OVAL OFFICE.
But recently I’ve been rethinking my notions of success. Like, just because I know how to write an A paper and I’m good at standardized testing, does that make me successful? What about James? According to the unspoken-but-obvious criteria of “Most Likely to Succeed,” he’s a big failure because he stayed in Brockport and never went to college. But, on the other hand, he owns a profitable business and he’s happy, so shouldn’t he be considered successful, too?

These questions had been on my mind a lot, which is probably why I was struggling so much with my valedictory address. Every time I sat down at my computer to write an opening line, I could only muster up the cheesiest of clichés like “We’ve known each other for so long, it’s hard to believe we’re about to say goodbye…” and “As I stand in front of you today, I can see how bright our futures are going to be…” When I complained about this to James, he laughed and said, “I only have three words of advice: No Robert Frost.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t say that two roads diverged in a wood and you took the one less traveled…”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You will be in the high-school gym, not a yellow wood, and besides, it’ll make people resent you.”

“Okay,” I said. “So do you have any suggestions?”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

Mr. B wasn’t much help either. Whenever I saw him in the hall, he’d wave me over and shake my hand and tell me how graduation is his favorite day of the year. Then he’d make me copy down some slogan that he thought would be
perfect
for my speech, such as “Keep your feet on the ground and reach for the stars” or “A mind is like a parachute; it only works when it’s open.” I actually liked the parachute quote, though I couldn’t figure out how to tie jumping out of a plane into a valedictory address.