Tease(22)

“Sort of,” I mutter.

“And there was another incident at Miss Putnam’s home—” David starts saying.

Natalie holds up a hand, stopping him. “Let’s just deal with Valentine’s Day first.”

When Natalie found out about the Valentine’s Day stuff, back at our first meeting in May, I thought she was going to turn and walk out of the room, not take my case at all. She’s really composed most of the time, and all these weeks later I know how unusual that reaction was, when we were just going over the major points of the lawsuits Emma’s family filed against me, Brielle, Tyler, Jacob, and Dylan. Natalie’s face had gone several shades paler when we got to the number of roses Brielle and I had sent to Emma.

“Fifty?” she’d said, like she was sure she hadn’t heard me right.

Next to me, my mom had gone really quiet and still. Before that part she’d been sitting beside me on the couch in our living room, her hand on my back, very alert. But as I looked at my new lawyer’s dropped jaw I realized my mom wasn’t touching me anymore. She had moved a little farther down on the couch. Putting about a million miles of cushions between us.

“It was just . . .” At the time I’d tried to explain. It was a lot, okay? But it’s not like we beat her up in the school parking lot or something.

And now, Therapist Teresa is making me talk about it too. It’s fresh in my mind, since I just got here from Natalie’s office, where we’d gone through everything about Valentine’s week.

Something about Teresa’s room brings back that pit in my stomach I’d had during the whole thing. I tell her how I’d been sort of excited about the flowers until I’d seen Emma’s locker, and then I’d gotten dizzy.

“You felt good at first?”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “It was funny. It was just so many roses, you know? It looked ridiculous.”

“You wanted Emma to look ridiculous?”

“She’d been making me look stupid,” I point out.

“How so?”

“With Dylan.” God, Teresa can be stubborn.

“Mmm,” she says.

“But we didn’t do the thing to her locker,” I say. “They freaked out about the sign, because Mrs. Putnam allegedly saw us in their yard or whatever, and they started blaming us for everything.”

Emma’s mom hadn’t called the cops about the sign; she’d called the school. Natalie thought that could work to our advantage, because if you saw some kids in your yard and thought they were vandalizing or stalking, why would you wait until the next day and call the school?

But of course, calling our school that week was the worst possible timing for me and Brielle. By Wednesday, you really couldn’t ignore that someone was hassling Emma. The sign, the locker, the roses—Emma was only too happy to help the principal decide who was responsible for her shitty Valentine’s Day.

Teresa gives me a look. “And you say you’re definitely going to trial?”

I nod.

I shift on the couch, pulling my sweater around me.

“You must be worried,” she says.

“Who, me? Nah,” I say.

Teresa’s serious look turns into a smile. “You can be very charming when you want to be,” she says, and I think it’s supposed to be a compliment. “But this must all be incredibly stressful, despite your jokes.”

“Well, I guess some people just deal with stress better than others,” I snap. Teresa stops smiling and I look down at my hands, my face suddenly hot. After a long pause, I hear her writing something on her notepad. It probably says Shows no remorse. Is terrible person. No one would disagree with that. Not even me.





February


I GUESS IT’S weird, but we never get in trouble—for the Facebook thing or the locker room. No follow-up from Schoen, no phone call to our parents, nothing. I don’t realize until a week later that that was Brielle’s whole plan, to show Emma what happens when she tries to fight back. Emma couldn’t get us in trouble for making the Facebook page, so she didn’t even try after the locker room. Neither did anyone else. Coach Jenks didn’t see it, and the other girls are acting like they didn’t see it either. Of course, I happen to know that most of them hate Emma too. There were a lot of people friending Fat Beyotch before it was deleted.

I start making sure I meet Dylan between classes. I’ve had his schedule memorized all year, but now I’m not shy at all about being at each door, holding his hand as we walk to his locker. I get to my own classes later and later, but it’s worth it for the jealous but defeated look Emma gives us when we walk by. And by the end of the week, I stop worrying about her so much. I have other things on my mind—the Valentine’s dance, mostly, and whether Dylan is going to want to have sex again afterward. When he tells me he got a hotel room for an after-dance party and only a few other people are invited, I figure that means he does.

That’s how he asks me to the dance, in fact. We’re making out in his car, again, but he has to run to practice in ten minutes, so I know we can’t take things very far. And then with five whole minutes to go he pulls back and says, “I got a room at the Hyatt. After the dance. Tell Brielle to bring somebody cool.” He goes right back to kissing me and my mind spins out, thinking about the dress I’m planning to wear, and whether I can wear it to an after-party, or if I now have to worry about another outfit, and sexy underwear too, and what my mom’s gonna say, and . . . and, you know, what the hell this all means.