If I'm Being Honest(26)

I pause for a moment in front of the bookstore, taking in the hideous design. SECONDHAND SCI-FI AND FANTASY reads the cardboard sign in hasty permanent marker under the name of the store. In one window hangs an unbelievably detailed replica of a dragon, transparent wire around its neck and scaly tail. Wooden bookshelves packed with fat paperbacks fill the front of the store, covers decorated with indecipherable scenes of moons rising over shimmering cities, spaceships firing their weapons, and scantily clad elves and sorceresses squaring off with long-haired knights.

Whatever. With a half sigh, half grumble, I walk over to the box, reach my fingers under the cardboard, and heave.

It’s heavy. I glance under the lid. The contents only heighten my curiosity. Paige wants me to carry into the bookstore . . . a sewing machine, chunky and antiquated. No wonder the box weighs a hundred pounds. Other than the sewing machine, the box contains swatches of colored fabric, purples and reds, and a couple of pieces of black lace.

I walk into the Depths of Mordor and nearly drop the box on my feet. Because there’s my one ex-boyfriend, Grant Wells, perched on a faded green armchair between stacks of books, in fishnets.

And a corset.

And lingerie.

I freeze in the doorway. The shop’s nearly empty, but in the chairs around Grant, in what I’m realizing is a reading area in the sci-fi section, I notice a couple people I know from school. Abby Fleischman and Charlie Kim are doubled over laughing and cheering Grant on. The bookstore’s only other patron, a ponytailed middle-aged man in a WINTER IS COMING shirt, watches Grant with confusion and concern.

My eyes meet Grant’s. Like someone’s just kneed him in the balls, he emits a strangled squeak and hops off the chair.

I really don’t want to go over there. Not only is the visual of Grant in that outfit deeply disturbing, he inevitably reminds me of the utter disaster of my only previous attempt at dating.

It was an extraordinary lapse in judgment, the kind of regrettable mistake I’ll wish I could forget every day until I’m eighty. Grant Wells is the reason I swore off boys for two years. I went into the relationship without carefully considering the decision—without weighing the guy in question’s practicality, his rightness for me, his possible current girlfriends—and it ended horribly.

We dated for two months during sophomore year. I had flirted aggressively with him while he was dating Hannah Warshaw. Why? I honestly don’t know. He was Brad’s best friend, and it made a certain amount of sense for me to date him while Morgan dated Brad. Morgan specifically didn’t invite Hannah to her sixteenth birthday party, and my white string bikini was too much for Grant to handle. We hooked up in the Jacuzzi. I told Hannah the next day, she dumped him—and he was mine.

The problem was, he never really got over her. I could tell, and it’s possible I reacted badly. I flirted with his friends, I ignored him, and I paraded him in front of Hannah so she’d never want him back. I was pretty much the world’s worst girlfriend. By the time I very publicly dumped him, I didn’t even recognize myself. I’d become my mother, who clings to her hopeless attachment to my father despite everything, playing petty mind games and pining for affection from a guy with whom it would never work out. After Grant, I decided I would carefully plan the guys I date, to protect myself from obsessing over someone who’s not worth it.

Grant, for his part, fell out with the popular crowd and landed, I guess, with Paige’s friends.

In a corset. And fishnets.

I hope I live to forget the image. I need to make a hasty retreat. I don’t care if Paige wants to press me into indentured servitude in return for her forgiveness.

I’m searching for coffee table space for the sewing machine when the bell over the door rings and Paige hurries in. Before I have the chance to put the box down, she begins rummaging under the lid and pulls out a piece of lacey fabric.

“Okay,” she calls to her friends. “I found the perfect—”

From over my shoulder I hear Abby’s voice, affronted. “Why’s Cameron Bright holding your costume box?” She says my name with a disgust I don’t often hear. Whatever cachet I have with my classmates generally is absent among Paige’s friends.

Paige eyes me, as if realizing I’m an unexpected guest. “Relax, Abby,” she says with an authority I wouldn’t have expected. “She helped me avoid a parking ticket.”

Abby doesn’t reply. I get the sense Paige is kind of the ringleader of her gang.

“You mind plugging that in?” It takes me a moment to realize Paige is talking to me. I guess the tremendous aftershock of the image of Grant hasn’t entirely worn off.

I clear three books off the table—Dune, the covers read—and place the box down beside a figurine of a wizard. I open the lid, then pause. This can’t be cool with the shop. I check behind the counter or in the back for a clerk, but the place is practically vacant.

“It’s fine,” Paige says, noticing my hesitation. “The owner’s used to us.”

She walks over to her friends, past the towering bookshelves lining the left wall. I give the inside of the store a closer look. The back is crammed with oddly angled bookcases, a tight maze of black-painted wood and colorful book binding. On the ends of the rows of hardcovers and paperbacks sit dusty bookends in the shapes of skulls and mythical creatures. Covering the walls are murals of scenes like the books’ covers, but bigger—red and green planetary landscapes, medieval hunting parties, robots and monsters. It’s probably the nerdiest place I’ve ever seen.