The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(20)

Over drinks after the meeting, Sidney mused, “The new gym teacher looks like what’s his name—that hot actor who was in the movie we watched on cable last weekend . . .”

“Mark Wahlberg?”

“Yup. Do you think he’s married?”

“Mark Wahlberg?” Elena chose to deliberately misunderstand the question, buying herself a moment to decide whether she wanted to admit to Sidney that she, too, found him attractive. If she did, Sidney would probably back off in her intended pursuit.

As a statuesque, slender blonde, Sidney has no shortage of dates and—to her credit—is well aware that men gravitate toward her instead of relatively short, curvy, brunette Elena when they’re together.

“I don’t care whether Mark Wahlberg is married!” Sidney said. “I’m talking about the new gym teacher.”

“Nope. Not married—unless he is and he doesn’t wear a ring.”

“You looked?”

She grinned at Sidney over the rim of her pinot grigio glass. “Oh, I definitely looked.”

With that comment, Elena knew, she’d sealed the unspoken deal. Sidney would let her have the first shot at Tony.

It’s hard to remember, now, that there was a time when she thought of him as potential dating material . . . let alone that she actually went out with him.

Just once, back in September.

Once was all it took for her to realize that the guy was an opinionated jackass. Sidney was welcome to him—except by then she didn’t want him, either.

But he wanted Elena. He persisted in asking her out, so clueless that she finally resorted to inventing a fake boyfriend to get rid of him.

That was Meredith’s advice; Elena had confided in her about the situation. Confided in her about almost everything, really.

Tell him that you’re seeing someone else, Meredith wrote in an e-mail after Elena told her she couldn’t shake Tony.

You want me to lie? I can’t believe it! Elena wrote back teasingly. And here I thought you were a fine moral character.

Where did you get that idea? was the response, followed by ;-)—the Internet emoticon symbolizing a wink. A little white lie never hurt anyone. Trust me.

Meredith was right. It did the trick.

“I hope he makes you very happy,” Tony said about her fictitious boyfriend, and every time she saw him after that—which was every single weekday—he’d give her a sappy, sad little smile and ask how things were going in her relationship.

It took him a few months to stop asking and stop sad-smiling. In February he overheard Elena asking Sidney if she wanted to go to a singles night, and he asked if she’d broken up with her boyfriend.

Forced to say yes, she braced herself for him to start asking her out again, but it turned out he was dating someone else by then—or so he claimed. Sidney thought he was just trying to make her jealous, ostensibly playing hard to get.

“Either that,” she said, “or he’s seriously delusional, because I can’t imagine why anyone in her right mind would go out with him.”

“I did.”

“Once. And anyone would, once, because he’s gorgeous.”

The strange thing is, Elena barely notices the gorgeous anymore. It’s too hard to see past the desperate and the crazy.

“What’s up?” Elena asks him now, not in the mood for small talk.

“I got your note about the collection for a retirement gift for Betty Jamison.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask everyone on the staff to contribute the same amount. Some of us barely know this woman.”

It’s impossible for anyone to be employed at Northmeadow Elementary for any length of time and not have regular contact with Betty Jamison, head secretary in the main office, and the most beloved person on the staff.

But Elena opts not to waste time saying any of that to Tony. “Just donate what you think is fair, then.”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t want to come across as cheap if everyone else is donating more. What I think you might want to do is reword the memo so that . . .”

He drones on.

Elena’s hand clenches around the computer mouse. She looks again at the computer screen, thinks again about Meredith.

Thinks of her lying there, lifeless.

She never knew what hit her.

The line fits, but the voice in Elena’s head isn’t referring to Meredith.

No, she’s remembering what her father said to her uncle after her mother was killed. It happened twenty-five years ago, when she was an eavesdropping seven-year-old, but she remembers the conversation like it was yesterday.

Her father was repeating what the police had told him about the accident. Apparently, the signal at the railroad crossing had failed, so her mother had driven onto the tracks into the path of an oncoming train . . .

“She never knew what hit her. That’s what they told me, Louie . . .”

“You gotta admit, Bobby—it’s not the worst way to go,” her uncle had said.

“What are you talking about?”

“No drawn-out suffering—not like Ma.” The brothers had lost their mother, Elena’s grandmother, not long before that. Cancer.

Of course, cancer. Always cancer . . .

Well, not always.

“Are you saying my wife was lucky to be hit by a friggin’ freight train?” her father yelled at Uncle Louie.