The Beginning of Everything(52)

“Screw you,” I said.

“Screw your girlfriend,” he retorted. “If you can get your crippled dick to work.”

Our table went quiet, and the white noise of the quad seemed to drop away until it was just me and Luke Sheppard, with his slacker glasses and nasty smirk and unforgivable insult.

I always thought it wouldn’t get to me, someone calling me crippled like I should be ashamed of myself. I suppose I’d only pictured it broadly, the word by itself, like when Charlotte called the debate team nerds, or the orchestra losers. But what Luke said wasn’t some generalized insult. It was genuinely offensive, and he wasn’t getting away with it.

“You are such an asshole,” Phoebe said, slapping Luke across the face. The slap echoed—or maybe the word is reverberated—and in its aftermath, the whole world roared back into place.

Phoebe got up, taking her backpack with her. The poltergeist of her unfinished lunch sat on the table, half of a chocolate cookie and a peanut butter sandwich missing two neat bites.

“I’m going to see if she’s all right,” Cassidy said.

“No.” I shook my head. “I’ll go.”

I found Phoebe sitting on the metal bench outside of the swim complex, at the very edge of the parking lot. There weren’t any lunch tables over there, so it was a decent place to sulk, if you didn’t mind the tang of chlorine.

Her eyes were red, and she cradled her right hand as though it still stung. She scooted down on the bench to make room for me, and I sat, and we said nothing.

“He’s such a jerk,” Phoebe mumbled after a while, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater.

“I know.” I reached into my backpack for a packet of tissues.

“You have tissues.” She shook her head as though I’d just offered her an embroidered handkerchief.

“My mom buys them in bulk. I’ve got hand sanitizer, too, if you want to cleanse Luke’s face from your fist.”

“You don’t have to be so nice to me,” she muttered.

“Well, you sort of defended my honor back there.”

“I slapped Luke Sheppard.”

She said his name as though it meant something. As though she didn’t even have the right to expect him to say hello to her in the hallways, and he really was as big a deal as he made himself out to be. It killed me, Phoebe sitting there in her ponytail and glasses, a year younger than me and so tiny that her toes barely touched the concrete, appalled at herself for being the only one of us brave enough to call Luke out on his bullshit.

“He was being a backpfeifen—whatever. His was the face that launched a thousand fists,” I said. “So don’t worry about it. You didn’t give him anything he didn’t deserve.”

“Now I sort of wish I’d slapped him harder,” Phoebe said thoughtfully.

I snorted.

“God, I can’t believe he said that.” Phoebe winced, like she was replaying it in her head. “No one thinks of you like that. With pity, or whatever. Luke always used to compare himself to you, how you both ran things. He’d complain about it constantly, how you were this smug, brainless jock who did nothing but took all the credit. And now you’re on the same side, and you’re actually pretty cool, and it’s killing him. I mean, if there’s anyone who doesn’t belong at our lunch table, it’s me.”

It had never struck me that Phoebe was insecure about sitting with us. Maybe it was because I’d always seen our table as co-ed, rather than a group of boys with their girlfriends, or maybe it was because Phoebe got along so well with everyone. But I couldn’t stand to see her awash in self-doubt like that.

“Hey,” I said sternly, the way I did back when I had to give pep talks to the team. “Listen. Everyone at our lunch table loves you.”

Phoebe regarded me like she wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth.

“But what if they stop?” she asked, wincing.

“If you and Luke break up?”

Phoebe shook her head. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “It’s like . . . I’m paranoid about people borrowing my laptop because I’m convinced they’ll find some secret document on there that would make the whole world think I’m a terrible person—something I don’t even remember writing. And it doesn’t matter that there’s no document like that. I’m still terrified, you know?”

“Everyone feels like that,” I said. “Even Luke.”

“You’re wrong. Luke doesn’t care if everyone thinks he’s a horrible person, so long as they do what he says.”

I realized then that Phoebe knew him infinitely better than I ever would. That Luke had put his arm around her at the movies and his tongue down her throat at debate tournaments, and not once had she ever seemed happy about it, about them.

“Just once I want someone to be afraid of losing me,” Phoebe said. “But the only thing Luke’s afraid of losing is power.”

I shrugged, not knowing what to say, so I didn’t say anything for a while. I stared out at the gym across from the swim complex, and after a few minutes, I put my arm around Phoebe, because she was small and crying, and it seemed like the thing to do. And we sat like that until the bell rang.



WE HAD VOTING for homecoming court that week, the glitter-encrusted ballot box mocking me as it sat in the front of my homeroom. We were supposed to nominate one boy and one girl for the court, and I was never good at that. It felt weird voting for myself, even in things like student government elections where I’d had to take the initiative to run, and I always felt like my votes were disingenuous when I wrote down my friends. In the end I left my ballot sheet blank.