Here So Far Away(4)

“We got it,” Nat said. “While I was sitting on a toilet with a bucket on my lap, George was rejecting the hot new guy—and it only made her more popular! Bravo, life!”

Bill and I weren’t doing a good job of holding our faces in check. In fairness, it wasn’t always clear when Nat was trying to be funny.

Lisa glowered at us and stroked Nat’s hair. “You shouldn’t have led Joshua on if you weren’t interested,” she said. “Keith is so pissed.”

“How did I lead him on? By standing next to him at a party? Letting him drive me home?”

“Leaving his girlfriend behind without a ride, kissing him . . .”

I’d been betting that Joshua wouldn’t tell Keith any of it, never mind the kissing part, and I could see Lisa was doubly pissed that I hadn’t told her myself.

“You said she wasn’t his girlfriend. He said she wasn’t his girlfriend.”

“Duh. He lied,” Bill said.

I guess I knew that, but I didn’t have to admit it.

“Well, that is news to me. Also, technically? He kissed me. Which was . . . it was . . .”

Lisa was giving me the eyebrow, not blinking, not getting it.

Sid would have. Bill did. “Bad breath? Biter? Did he lick around the outside of your mouth?”

Nat propped her head up on her arm to look across the table at him. “You really have to break up with Tracy.”

“Not Tracy. Remember Becky, the cocker spaniel from hockey camp? My mouth, my nose, my ears.” He leaned over until his face was nearly touching mine. “So, what was it, little snake darts? Nasty hiss-hiss coming at you? Hiss-hissssssss—”

I shook him by the shirt collar until he was all hissed out. “Anaconda tongue, you jackass.”

“That’s it?” Lisa said. “Oh—phew!”

“No phew,” I said. “How did we get to phew?”

“You can rehabilitate a bad kisser.”

“Hell no,” Bill said. “You can take mediocre to okay, and you can get from okay to some approximation of the fundamentals of good, but you’ll never get from bad all the way to good. Right, Nat?”

“If you ain’t got no rhythm, ain’t no one gonna teach you to dance.”

“Exactly. Homegirl.”

“Geo-or-or-orge,” Lisa groaned. “We’re talking about a love story more than a decade in the making. Are you going to walk away because of one bad kiss?”

In a word: “Yup.”

“That’s cold-blooded, even for you.”

“But good news for the Face,” Nat said. “Who, by the way, is coming over.”

I twisted the soreness from my morning run out of my back and glanced behind us. Christina was leaving three tables of Elevens, who all watched as she strode toward us. She was a tiny thing—pipe-cleaner legs, dirty-blond hair down to her waist, razor cheekbones. She could cut a person. Would. And I had sort-of stolen her sort-of boyfriend in front of half the school. That was a big shack party.

We were starting senior year as the reigning popular group, as you define it at a country high school. We’d inherited it. In eleventh grade, pre-Keith, Lisa had dated a senior, captain of the basketball team, and the rest of us got pulled along with her. They graduated, we got bumped up, she dumped the old captain for the new captain, simple as that. We were set to be the most benevolent and boring ruling class of any high school ever. We weren’t bullies, didn’t get up in anyone’s face. People liked us. We spent most of our time doing exactly what we were doing at that moment—making each other laugh and/or ganging up on someone for their own good—and we collectively gave only enough of a crap about where we stood not to give it up.

But the new Elevens cared. They were a large group, slitty-eyed girls and thickheaded boys. Always posturing, always too loud, always lip-curling, slow-moving, filling as much space as possible. They could not wait until we were out of the way.

I wasn’t worried about what this Joshua stuff might mean for us, but I could sense Lisa’s nerves the way she could sniff a lie as I exhaled it. She was, after all, my top-tier friend, and she’d been looking forward to senior year since kindergarten, when she started transforming herself from a frizzy-haired bundle of ugly duckling into the second coming of Molly Ringwald, Breakfast Club edition. Plus, she and Keith had gotten caught between me and the Tongue and the Face. So when Christina stopped at our table and said, loudly enough to be heard by her friends, “What’s wrong, George? Sex injury?”—I wasn’t having it.

I stood up so I was towering over her and stretched my back again, nice and easy. “Yeah,” I said, “but, baby, I’m good to go again if you are.”

It wasn’t one of my better lines, but in the pause that followed, I learned something about Christina Veinot: she wasn’t up for a quick comeback. That left her with pretending to laugh or being humorless and earnest, and her group didn’t do earnest. They learned that from us. She went with a small head shake and faint smile, like we were a couple of gal pals exchanging quips. “Well, say hi to Joshua for me,” she said, the hardness gathering again behind her eyes.

It didn’t take much—just a fragment of movement, just the suggestion of a step in her direction. “George!” Lisa said.