The Romantics(4)

Anika looked down to her scuffed-up red Mary Janes, the ones she’d found in Goodwill the day Gael scored a faded Taxi Driver shirt. “I’m sorry.”

The first thing: a thump and a shaking all over, like an earthquake only Gael could feel.

The second thing: her eyes lifting to his in confirmation. Something so impossible it had occupied exactly zero percent of his mental space had actually happened, just like that.

The third thing: people on the periphery, staring. Flashes of humans who had nothing to do with him and Anika. Devon Johnson. Mark Kaplan. Amberleigh Shotwell, reigning first-chair flute in band. He suddenly wondered how many of these people had known this was happening—it wasn’t as if Anika and Mason were exactly being discreet. Gael imagined them laughing at him over greasy cafeteria grilled cheese: stupid, starry-eyed Gael who didn’t have a clue what his girlfriend and best friend were doing behind his back.

“You have to be kidding,” he said, his voice wavering and the first tear spilling down his cheek. Gael couldn’t believe she was doing this to him, especially after everything that had happened with his parents. It was like it was her personal mission to confirm his biggest fear: that love wasn’t real. How could it be if two people who’d seemed happy for his entire life suddenly weren’t?

“How long has this been going on?” he asked, desperately praying that what he’d just witnessed was a brief moment of weakness, a fluke.

Anika bit her lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “A week, I guess.”

A week? Anika and Mason had been doing who knows what for an entire week?

Gael grabbed Anika’s shoulder, hanging on as if for dear life, and wrestled to get control of himself. “Look, you’re confused and freaked out by what I said. Maybe if we just talk about this. What do you say? We’ll ditch first period.” Gael had never ditched a period in his life. Anika had, though, when she had waited in line for Flaming Lips tickets.

Anika always got what she wanted. And now she no longer wanted him.

“No, Gael. I can’t.” She tried to shrug his hand off.

Instead of letting go, Gael grabbed her other arm, desperately looking into her face. “Please.”

For a second, there was sympathy in her dark brown eyes, and Anika almost looked like she was going to change her mind, like she suddenly realized that trading what she and Gael had for whatever the hell was going on with Mason was the stupidest thing in the world. Then a commanding “Excuse me!” broke the moment, the onlookers quickly dispersed, and Mrs. Channing materialized, looking at Gael sternly through frameless glasses. “Is there a problem here?”

Gael let Anika go, surreptitiously wiped the moisture from his eyes, and shoved his wet hand in his jacket pocket, where he fingered a mini-pack of tissues that he hadn’t remembered putting there. (You’re welcome, Gael.)

“Anika?” Mrs. Channing asked.

Anika hesitated. She actually hesitated. “No,” she said finally. Meekly. Un-Anika-ly.

Mrs. Channing turned to Gael. “Can I see you in my office, Gael?”

“I have to go to class,” he said. His eyes flitted back to Anika.

“I’ll write you a pass,” Mrs. Channing said. “Come on.”

So Gael followed her down the hall, biting the insides of his cheeks to stop himself from falling apart in front of everyone.

He glanced back at Anika, but instead of looking sympathetic, she was rushing to her first class without so much as a glance back.

Anika had always marched to the beat of her own drum.

Only now, she was marching away from him.





a humiliating interlude in the guidance counselor’s office


Hang in there! read a poster on Mrs. Channing’s wall, a stock image of an upside-down cat suspended on monkey bars. Next to it was a photo of a cat crumpled on the ground, white block letters over it: haynging n ther is overated.

“Is everything okay with you, Gael?”

Gael pressed his feet firmly into the dingy tiles of the tiny office and crumpled the tissue in his hand. His breathing was shaky. That morning, things had been so good—or as good as they could be, under the circumstances. He was a senior. He had a decent shot of getting accepted to UNC. He had Anika. He had Mason.

Sure, he was hoping against hope that his parents would get their act together and his dad would move back in, but his relationship with Anika had distracted him from all that.

It had distracted him from everything.

Normally, Gael took after his dad in the anxiety department—he always seemed to be worrying about something: whether he was taking the right number of AP classes; whether he was practicing his tenor sax enough; whether his little sister, Piper, would ever make friends her own age (she was just so smart and so uninterested in normal eight-year-old things); whether the occasional constellation of zits on his forehead made him wholly undateable. And on and on and on.

But when he and Anika had finally started dating, it was like none of the stressful things mattered. Because even though it was arguably at the worst time of his life, even though it had only been just over a month since his parents had broken the still-difficult-to-comprehend news, he suddenly felt . . . good.

His family might be falling apart, but Gael and Anika were just beginning.

And now she’d dumped him.

And he was somehow supposed to believe that it was all because of Mason? Mason, who’d been raiding their freezer for Bagel Bites since they were both Piper’s age. Mason, who routinely accompanied Gael to indie movies even though he was an action-and-shitty-dialogue sort of guy.