Vegan Virgin Valentine (3 page)

V was opening her mouth to say something when the second bell rang.

“Almost time for announcements!” Rosemary exclaimed. “Let me go look for your records, Vivi … I mean, V.”

Rosemary headed into an adjacent room. V picked up a cafeteria menu and began fanning her neck. “Principals’ offices make me sweat my ass off,” she said.

I glanced around to make sure no one had heard her. V unzipped her army–navy jacket, wriggled out of it, and hung it over one arm.

Oh my God.

No wonder V had come down to the kitchen this morning already wearing her jacket. Underneath, she had on a hot-pink tank top with silver lettering that said
I’M JUST A GIRL WHO CAIN’T SAY NO.
To make matters worse, she was braless yet again, and her you-know-whats were poking through her shirt, feeling the morning chill.

“What’s up with that tank top?” I hissed.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you think that’s making the wrong first impression?”

“What first impression do you think I want to make?”

I shifted my bag around on my shoulder and glanced up at the clock. Three minutes until homeroom.

Ms. Green walked into the office. She’s one of the younger teachers at the high school. She teaches sophomore English but also directs the school plays, so she’s frequently trailed by aspiring thespians hoping to brownnose their way into a leading role.

Ms. Green waved at me and then eyed V. “Are you new here?”

“I’m Mara’s niece,” V said.

I flinched. Why couldn’t V just be my cousin? My
long-distance
cousin.

But all Ms. Green said was, “Cool shirt. Like Ado Annie.”

V smiled. “You know Ado Annie?”

“Of course.” Ms. Green walked over to the mail cubbies and pulled out a few envelopes.

I had no idea what they were talking about, and I didn’t want to be late for homeroom, so I tapped my fingers on the counter. “I’ve got to run,” I said. “Rosemary will send you over to the guidance counselors to get your schedule figured out. Is that okay?”

V chewed at her thumbnail. “I
cain’t
say no.”

I didn’t see V for the rest of the day. I left school before noon, headed over to the college for my Tuesday/Thursday statistics class, ate a Boulder Bar, and spent the afternoon holed up in Drake Memorial Library. I was busy memorizing influential Supreme Court rulings for a test in government the next day when my cell phone vibrated on the table.

I glanced at the caller ID. My dad. My parents and I have a Family Talk plan where all our cell phones are linked, so it’s free minutes whenever we call each other. They keep frequent tabs on my whereabouts, but it’s not like I’m doing anything shady, so I don’t really mind.

I pressed the “answer” button and said hello.

“Mara?” my dad asked. He always does that, asks if it’s me when he knows for a fact it’s me because he dialed my number. “Where are you?”

“I’m in the college library,” I said in a hushed voice. “I can’t really talk.”

“Oh, okay,” my dad said. “I just got back from Wegmans, and Mom is on her way from work. Will you be home soon?”

“What time is it?”

“Six-twenty.”

I was working at Common Grounds that night, but I didn’t have to be there until seven-thirty. It’s a five-minute drive from the college to my house, so I could easily pull off the family dinner. But I just didn’t feel like seeing V. Besides, the government test was going to count for 15 percent of my grade and, at this point, I’m striving for any edge over Travis.

“I’m going to keep studying. I’ll head to work from here.”

“What will you do for dinner?”

“I’ll grab something at Mythos,” I said, referring to this vegan-friendly Greek place right across the street from Common Grounds.

“Do you have enough money on you?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s already dark out. Will you be careful when you walk to your car?”

“I know, I know, I will.”

“Okay, sweetie. Have fun tonight. Mom and I will probably be asleep when you get home, but we’ll leave the yard lights on.”

It was great to be at Common Grounds. We were crammed with customers all evening. College students hunched over mugs of chai, writing in their journals. Local burnouts doing espresso shots in between playing Hacky Sack under a streetlamp on the snowy sidewalk. Middle-aged types consuming the mother of paradoxical desserts: fudge cake and a nonfat decaf latte. My favorites, however, were the Internet daters.

Claudia and I have a field day with them. Claudia Johns is a junior at SUNY Brockport. We do all our shifts together, so over the past year we’ve honed the art of identifying dot-com matches.

“Twenty-something mama’s boy seeks, well, mom,” Claudia recently said when a geeky guy held the door for a chubby woman who looked like she was at least ten years older than him.

I responded with, “I like walking on sandy beaches, eating candlelit dinners, and having someone read
The Runaway Bunny
to me at bedtime.”

Claudia giggled. “And what do you think is the woman’s deal?”

I thought for a second before saying, “She just wants a bling-bling on her fing-fing before her biological clock goes ding-ding.”

Claudia and I were in hysterics over that one. We didn’t sober up until James, our boss, got on our case for making fun of customers. “Just have a little discretion,” he said. “We still need to sell them an overpriced cup of coffee.”

It’s weird to call James our boss. He’s more like a friend. James McCloskey is twenty-two and the owner of Common Grounds. He opened the café when he was only nineteen. I’m constantly telling him he’s totally prodigal. Especially since it’s not a grungy dive. It’s dimly lit, with an exposed brick wall, an assortment of hand-painted tables, and a fully functional vintage coffee roaster.

I’ve never been sure why James didn’t go to college. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He and I are always debating things like What Constitutes Art and Does Advertising Influence Us Even Though We Swear It Doesn’t. He has this ability to think it over and form his own opinions, not just read and regurgitate an article, like I always seem to do.

That Thursday night, Claudia arrived at work shaken up because an eighty-year-old guy nearly plowed her down as she was crossing Holley Street. This prompted James and me into a big debate about whether senior citizens should automatically get their licenses taken away. I was sitting on the stool behind the counter. I’m taller than both Claudia and James, so I usually sit down when I’m talking to them. I was saying things like, “Grandma and Grandpa are a hazard to themselves and everyone else on the road, not to mention that they drive in first gear on the highway.” James kept insisting that many elderly people are fine drivers and the DMV should just do a yearly evaluation of their abilities.

After ten minutes, Claudia began grinding coffee beans so loudly that neither of us could talk. “Will you two quit it already?” she shouted. “
I’m
the one who almost died tonight, not you guys.”

I cracked up. That’s exactly what I love about Common Grounds. It gets me out of myself. I took the job here to diversify my college application, but it’s become so much more. When I’m serving coffee and goofing around with Claudia and James, I feel like a different person. I’m not obsessing about my grade-point average or hyperanalyzing a conversation or thinking about my to-do list for the upcoming week, month, and year.

Around nine-thirty, James was tinkering with the coffee roaster at the back of the café. Claudia was brewing a pot of Mocha Java. Just as I squirted cleanser on the counter and began scrubbing off a coffee stain, a beefy middle-aged guy strutted through the door. He was wearing a black leather jacket and had this pimpish gold earring in his left lobe. Several steps behind him was a tiny blond woman, probably in her early thirties. Her hands fluttered in front of her face, as if she were hoping no one would recognize her.

“Recent divorcé paid a visit to Piercing Pagoda before getting ‘out there’ again,” I whispered to Claudia as I tossed a paper towel in the trash.

As Claudia glanced in their direction, I noticed that her licorice-black hair was pulled into a messy ponytail. That’s odd for Claudia. She’s one of those lucky souls with shiny straight hair. She’s always running to the bathroom with a brush in hand and then shaking her mane around her shoulders.

“And the girl?” I asked. “What’s the blond girl’s deal?”

“The blond girl … the blond girl…” Claudia stared at them like she was trying to come up with a response. Finally she moaned and said, “I’m sorry. I’m really pining tonight. I can hardly think straight.”

“You are?”

Claudia nodded sadly.

“Oh, Claud,” I said. “Are you going to tell him soon?”

Claudia shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve dropped enough hints, haven’t I? If he hasn’t guessed by now, he must not like me back.”

Claudia was talking about James. That’s the Big Unspoken Dynamic at Common Grounds. Claudia is in love with James. She’s had a crush on him since we both started here last year. She’s always giggling at everything he says and complimenting his sweaters and bringing him cans of chicken soup when he’s got the slightest sniffle. He’s definitely nice to her. But he’s nice to everyone, so I’ve never been able to figure out whether he likes her back.

James is three inches shorter than me, which makes him a perfect match for Claudia. He’s got broad shoulders, a cute smile, and medium-length chestnut hair that he usually keeps in a ponytail. Claudia says it flatters his bone structure, but I just can’t get into male ponytails.

The guy with the leather jacket and the blond woman approached the counter. I glanced briefly at James. He was still over by the roaster. I could have sworn he was watching me because we made eye contact for a second. As he looked away, I felt this weird thump in my stomach.

Claudia poured coffee for the customers. I rang them up on the cash register.

Once they headed to the condiment island, I turned to Claudia and said, “Beautiful black-haired Common Grounds employee finally works up the nerve to tell the guy she loves how she feels about him…”

Claudia whimpered. “And loses her job and her pride in the process?”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

“Then what?”

“Maybe, just maybe, he loves her back.”

“Do you really think that could happen?”

“You won’t know unless you try.”

“Thanks, Mara,” Claudia said as she dried her hands on a dishcloth. “I really needed to hear that.”

When Ash Robinson approached my locker the next morning, I knew something was up. Ash is the school gossip. The only times she ever seeks me out is when she either has dirt or wants dirt. When Travis dumped me last April, she sent me an e-mail inviting me to the Strand with her. From the ticket counter to the concession stand, she had questions. “Was it another girl? Are you devastated? Angry?” I was finally off the hook when the lights dimmed. By then Ash was craning her neck around the theater, scanning for faces from school.

“Hey, Mara.” Ash leaned against the locker next to mine.

“Hey, Ash.” I closed my government notebook. The end-of-the-unit test was first period, so I’d been doing some last-minute cramming. “What’s up?”

“I just wanted to know if you’d heard. I didn’t want you to find out from, like, the wrong person.”

Bingo.

“Heard what?”

“About your … uh… What is she again? That V girl?”

“Long story, but I have a sister who’s much—”

“Right,” Ash said. “About her and Travis Hart.”

“What did you say?”

“About V and Travis. How they”—Ash leaned in so close I could smell the Dentyne Ice on her breath—“fooled around yesterday.”

I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. My heart started racing as Ash told me how Travis and V wound up in the same fourth-period gym class. Ash wasn’t there, but she heard from highly reliable sources that V didn’t have any gym clothes, so she had to sit in the bleachers and dodge flyaway birdies. After a few minutes, Travis abandoned his badminton partner and became V’s one-man welcome committee. Travis is senior class president, so he can pretty much get away with murder. I’m senior class treasurer, so the most I can get away with is borrowing a dollar if I’m short of cash in the cafeteria. Not that I eat school food, but that’s beside the point.

No one is sure whether Travis knew upfront that V was my relative, but someone heard him laughing and saying,
“Cain’t say no,
huh?” Someone else saw her stroking his head where his hair was recently buzzed. And the next time that person looked up, Travis and V had disappeared. Toward the end of the period, Ted Papazian went into the boys’ locker room. He heard murmuring in the shower area and, upon glancing into a stall, witnessed Travis going at it with a tall, longhaired girl wearing a pink tank top.

By this point, Ash’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets. “Lips locked,” Ash said. “Hands everywhere. Full-frontal grinding.”

“Did Ted say anything to them?”

“No, he got out of there fast. He didn’t want to be, like, a pervert.”

“Did anyone ask Travis about it later?”

Ash shook her head. “He left for his college class right after gym, so no one saw him for the rest of the day.”

“Do you think they…?”

She shrugged. “I’m just stating the facts. I’m not jumping to any conclusions.”

The first bell rang. People started slamming their lockers and filtering into homerooms. My throat felt tight, like I was going to cry. I took a few shallow breaths.

“I’m so sorry, Mara,” Ash said, patting my arm. “I could hardly believe it myself. There’s, like, no family loyalty these days, you know?”

I hugged my notebook to my chest and began crying. Ash reached into her purse, pulled out a mini-pack of Kleenex, and handed me a tissue. She’d obviously come prepared.

I spent all of homeroom fending off tears. First period was even worse. I couldn’t concentrate during the government test and kept mixing up the Supreme Court rulings and completely blanked on which state had the ballot controversy during the Bush–Gore presidential election. It didn’t help that Travis was three seats up, his spiky head hunched over his paper. I kept thinking about what Ash said.
Lips locked. Hands everywhere. Full-frontal grinding. Lips locked. Hands everywhere. Full-frontal grinding. Lips locked. Hands everywhere. Full-frontal grinding.