Life by Committee Read online

  Paul doesn’t even uncross his legs, and I want to stand up and help, but get momentarily distracted by Alison’s deep frown and new glasses. She’s reading The Fountainhead. I love The Fountainhead. I miss having friends who do things like wear uncool glasses and read The Fountainhead. I miss having more than one friend, period.

  “Paul? Babe? Backup?” Cate calls out again.

  Paul and I are even bigger assholes, because Cate’s pregnant and it shows. She touches her stomach every few seconds and even puts a hand to her lower back from time to time, as if she is eight months in and not five.

  “I’ll go,” Paul says. “You stay right here. Show ’em who’s boss.”

  “You okay to work?” I ask. My dad’s smoking up is no secret. Not to me, not to Cate, and not to the other town stoners. But a lot of people wouldn’t like knowing he is high on the job. Around their kids. Making their soy lattes.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “You okay by yourself? Those girls aren’t gonna start anything with you, right?”

  “Paul,” I say, loving him even now, with his T-shirt fading and old and his hair a hot mess of bed head and newly sprouted gray. “They’re not, like, a gang. Their weapons are basically silence and backstabbing.” He nods. Alison and Jemma snort. They probably heard that, too.

  I don’t mind being at the table alone. The café is my home, and I collaged this table myself when I was ten and too small to know that Peter, Paul, and Mary are not actually cool, even though they are from the sixties or whatever. Pictures and lyrics from them are glued in overlapping enthusiasm, and then laminated. The table is one of my many masterful contributions to the decor, which is all homemade craftiness and ironic kitsch. Heaven. And pretty much the same basic design choices as our actual home, a little house a few miles down the street in the shadow of a mountain.

  Anyway, now that I’m at the table alone I can hook up my computer and hope to see Joe already online.

  No such luck. Maybe I imagined the whole ecstatic conversation the other day. Maybe I’ve imagined every late-night conversation with Joe. I look up old chats, and there they are. Pages and pages of Joe calling me adorable and asking me what I love about used books, and telling me how out of place he feels around the other hockey players sometimes.

  The chats are all there, but in real life, nothing has happened. I get headaches from thinking too hard about what it would be like to kiss him, but it can’t happen while he has a girlfriend. Once in a while our fingers will touch in the middle of a card game, and that accidental touch is so electric, I wonder if I could survive an actual kiss.

  My one and only friend Elise is online and I throw out a hey lady, but she doesn’t respond, so she’s probably actually doing homework. Or she knows I’d just be using her as a distraction. Even though we have only been friends since the summer, she always sees right through me.

  I don’t love her with the decade-long devotion that I had for Jemma, but she’s kind and effortlessly cool and as smart as my old friends. But we don’t share that special history of hot chocolate stands, snowball fights, pig Latin conversations, chocolate chip cookie baking competitions.

  That said, she has also never told me I am going in the wrong direction as a person, so she wins.

  I keep accidentally looking up and over at Jemma. If Joe were online I’d be 100 percent distracted and wouldn’t have to wonder what Jemma thinks of my clothes and my hair and the tightness of my black pants today.

  Note: they are tight. But everyone is wearing tight black pants lately. And my ass has grown into a shape that makes every pair of pants look kind of tight. Not a bad shape. But a new shape.

  I am a new shape. And they hate that shape.

  My foot starts twitching of its own accord, and I’m dizzy with the anticipation and the knowledge that it could be hours (hours!) before Joe logs on and we can enter back into banter and whatever that other thing is: daring each other to push it further? Anticipating what could be? Gambling? I’m not sure, but it feels good and buzzing and warm and it makes me ill with anxiety. I can’t decide what makes me more nervous: the idea that it might happen in real life, or the worry that it might end before it begins.

  I’m not a person who would kiss someone else’s boyfriend. Except that I am someone who is desperate to kiss Joe. I’ve never been two people at once before, and I don’t like it.

  I send Elise a few more chats, begging her to stop being a good student and gossip with me instead. When that fails, I get up and sneak myself another mug of coffee from behind the counter. Paul winks at me. I head back to my table and stir in the requisite three and a half packets of sugar.

  “Tabitha?”

  Alison doesn’t speak to me ever anymore. But Jemma will still butt in from time to time. I don’t even hate it. It still feels good to have her close by, even though it then feels totally terrible if I actually listen to the words she’s saying.

  I look up and for a split second forget she’s not my friend anymore. She has on the same style hoodie she wears almost every day, today in red, and she crosses her arms awkwardly over her chest. She’s not pretty, not hot, not popular or talented in any particular way. She’s smart, which is why I liked her so much. She’s ambitious and listens to NPR and has a really fascinating opinion on almost everything. Including, lately, me.

  “I mean this as like, friendly advice,” Jemma starts. Alison looks on with interest. Hugs The Fountainhead to her chest like a raft. “But one of the seniors told me I should mention to you that the black eyeliner is, like, a little out of control this week.”

  Oh right. This. This is why we aren’t friends. Now I remember.

  My skirts. My makeup. The looks I give boys. Maybe even the looks they sometimes give me.

  The looks her brother, Devon, gave me.

  And okay fine, the fact that I started touching my hair a lot around him, and wearing extra makeup and my smallest skirts when I went over to her house. I started flirting. I guess that was sort of bad.

  But not that bad.

  “And today . . . are you wearing some kind of crazy padded pushup bra?” Jemma continues. “Because, um . . . that is a lot of cleavage. And my mom said some of the teachers are mentioning it as being a problem too. . . .” Jemma keeps the same look of bullshit-concern on her face for all of this, even cringing with mock humility at the word bra. We’re sixteen, not seven. The girl has seen my nipples, for chrissakes. We compared nipple size in the seventh grade. I lent her one of my training bras when her mother wouldn’t get her one. We Googled “blow job,” like, two years ago when we heard everyone was giving them.

  “I’m wearing a normal bra,” I say, as if that’s somehow the only pertinent part of the conversation so far. Jemma gives me a look like she doesn’t buy it, and I wish this was a problem a change of bra could solve. “What did you need, Jem?” I immediately wish that I’d stopped myself from using a nickname. It hurts, the remembered intimacy hanging in the air between us.

  “You’ve just changed so much.”

  “I haven’t changed at all,” I say. And this I actually mean. Because a sudden jump in cup size isn’t the same thing as changing who I am. Can’t you be bookish and chill and also sort of a little bit hot? I’d still rather spend my Saturday nights curled on the paisley couch with a book and a chocolate croissant. I just want to do it with makeup on.

  “It makes me sad, seeing you like this, hearing people talk about you the way they are, asking me what’s going on with you,” Jemma says, gesturing vaguely at my face and maybe my low-cut peasant top, which is hardly stripper-wear or anything. “We said we’d never dress like those girls, remember? We said we’d never prioritize guys over everything else. We weren’t going to be like this.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have let Paul go behind the counter. I’m obviously not capable of being on my own right now. Paul would have chimed in with something snarky and cool, something that shows Jemma’s a bitch and that I don’t care.

  I open and close my mout
h like a fish because I can’t think of actual words to say in response.

  “You’re becoming this Other Person,” Jemma says very, very slowly. “And hanging out with Elise . . .”

  Elise wears baggy pants and a Don’t Mess with Me look on her face. That’s what Jemma’s trying to get at, but she’s choosing her words carefully so as not to sound judgmental. In Vermont we are not judgmental. We are concerned.

  “Elise isn’t exactly trouble,” I say. Also true. Elise doesn’t party or wear low-cut shirts or anything. Just has short hair and a bunch of brown leather bracelets and pushes the dress code by wearing obnoxious T-shirts underneath her chunky cardigan sweater collection.

  Scandalous.

  Elise wants to go to Harvard. She volunteers at the hospital and plays with sick kids. She’s practically a saint. A lesbian saint.

  Jemma has glassy eyes like she might cry.

  It didn’t only make her angry, when I started liking boys more than sci-fi movie marathons and when I started getting catcalls in the halls. It also made her sad.

  I think I hate her sadness even more.

  Which makes no sense, because I’m the one who got ditched and is still getting assaulted by random insults and slut implications, even if I’m in the supposedly safe haven of Tea Cozy. If anyone should be crying, it’s definitely me.

  “I hate everything about this conversation,” I say, because at a certain point you have to say exactly what you’re thinking.

  “It’s a small school,” Jemma concludes. “People notice. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I feel myself blush even though I want to stay tough. I even feel a little sinking in my stomach, and my hands go to my collarbone, protecting the naked parts of me. I wish I had a turtleneck sweater and a big knit scarf to cover up whatever they’re seeing. I wonder which customers are listening in on our conversation. I know if the situation were reversed, I would be eavesdropping the hell out of this moment. I love little more than watching other people’s lives happen to them.

  Jemma sees the blush spreading on my face and pats my shoulder. Pats. It. Like I’m a child and she’s a teacher and I have sooooo much to learn. I shrug her off and turn my attention to my computer, where Joe has finally logged on, and the machine is pinging at me urgently.

  I see Jemma see his name.

  I don’t cover the screen, even though I should.

  She nods at it, and I know she’s taking note and that I will hear a rumor about me and Joe in the next week. Except by this time next week, maybe it won’t really be a rumor so much as the truth. I’m a terrible, terrible person for how good that feels, buzzing inside me. The thought of there being an us.

  I grab hold of my huge mug and let it cover my face (and my smile) as I take a long sip.

  Jemma wrinkles her nose and is going to say more, I think, but Paul reappears, hands on hips as he stands too close to her for it to be comfortable.

  “Are you and Alison getting something else? Because I really can’t let you take that table for very long if you’re not purchasing food or another beverage,” Paul says. Sometimes I think my father is a high school girl too.

  “I’ll get a cookie,” Jemma says. Jemma and Paul used to be friends in their own right. She would tease him about his spaciness, and he would fight back with jokes about her crazy knack for organizing everything, including our own refrigerator when its messiness started really bugging her.

  Then they would talk books for, like, hours. Because the only people in the world who read more than me are Jemma and Paul.

  “I think we’re out of cookies,” Paul says. An entire glass display case filled with cookies of every variety is a few feet behind him. He looks over to it and shrugs at the trays and trays of cookies.

  I have no idea if I am proud to have Paul as my dad right now, humiliated, or a little scared he’s going to get in trouble for harassing a teenager. He leans on the spare chair at my table and makes a kind of clucking sound with his tongue against his teeth. I’m sure Jemma can sniff out the stale, hay-like, almost-sweet smell of just-smoked weed coming off him.

  Jemma knows too many of my secrets.

  She looks back at my computer one more time. Joe has not stopped chatting me. I doubt she can read the words from where she is, but she can definitely see his name, in bold, popping up a half dozen times in a row on my screen. She opens her mouth to comment, but changes her mind.

  “Right,” is all she says. It seems to be a commentary on everything she has disdain for at this moment: my cleavage, Paul’s childish meanness, my flirtation with Joe, the rules of being a normal human being.

  I am left in the wake of the things she said, and I don’t drown in them, exactly, but I’m having some trouble catching my breath. She and Alison stay in their corner, after Alison purchases a tea that Cate doesn’t know better than to give her, and they share a set of headphones and lean over an iPhone together. I picture the bespectacled or maxidress-wearing angry rocker chick they are probably listening to and Googling right now. She is probably singing a song that somehow tells them how right they are to hate me.

  I’m not really listening to much music lately. I don’t know who to listen to, or what it would mean about me if I started liking them. I’m determined not to become someone else. So I’ve given up music altogether basically.

  “Ridiculous,” Paul says. He is still gripping the top of the chair and rocking back and forth a little with the music Cate’s playing over the sound system. “And also, ballsy.” He grins. Almost everything terrible in life kind of amuses Paul. I’m hoping I’m moments away from growing into that trait, and that I will be a little more like him someday soon.

  Except without the yoga mat.

  “You can’t be weird about them, okay?” I say. “Like, give them cookies. It’s fine. They can eat cookies if they want.” I want to chat with Joe and hope that the rest of the day floats away.

  Especially the part where Joe grabbed Sasha’s ass.

  “I’ll find something else to be weird about, I guess,” Paul says, and he nudges his foot against the bottom of my chair so that it shakes a little.

  “Can’t wait.”

  “I have the perfect Forgive Your Ridiculous Father present,” he says, and reaches into his back pocket. Pulls out a beat-up copy of The Secret Garden. It’s not A Little Princess, but it’s the author’s other beautiful effing book, and I’m dead-on impressed. Not to mention, books from New York City are the best, because anyone could have written in them, and they have this infinite sense of possibility that books from the town bookstores don’t have. People in New York, or other cities, are probably like that too. Full of all kinds of hope, while I’m stuck here being small and limited.

  “Seriously?” I say, and grab it from his hands, flip through the yellowed pages, and see them covered, absolutely slathered, with margin notes. Dark-red pen. Curly, swirly, beautiful handwriting.

  “You haven’t had the easiest time, and I figured my favorite daughter needed something good,” Paul says. His dimples deepen, if that’s even possible, and there are one hundred things wrong with my life right now, and a few of them are in Tea Cozy with us, but man I lucked out in the dad department. “Plus, I found a marked-up copy of the terrible live-in-the-moment, self-help, we-are-all-small-specks-in-the-universe book I hate, The Power of Now.” Paul hates positive-thinking books. Hates them. They don’t jive with his yoga and meditation. Seems like all the same thing to me, but whatever. “So it was worth walking around the East Village for an extra hour before driving back today. Hate those quick trips. Turn around the second I get there basically.”

  I’m not even really listening anymore, because this book is amazing and whoever took these notes is amazing, and I want to dive right in. I wave him away, and he chuckles as he walks back to the counter. I have described the plot of The Secret Garden to him many times. He knows all about sullen Mary and her trip to her uncle’s kind-of-creepy mansion and her discovery of a beautiful, secret garden th
at leads her to be a better person and to live a brand-new, unexpected life. Paul’s never been super interested, but he likes when I’m excited about things, even if he doesn’t share the excitement.

  On the front page, the Red Script Note Taker has drawn a picture of a garden and written a haiku about rose petals and loneliness.

  I’m all in.

  I blast through five chapters of The Secret Garden and linger on every margin note like it’s a message from the universe directly to me. The note taker writes, Mary is real. Confused by life. Pissed at circumstance. Forgotten. Ready to explore the world, regardless. Brave. That place between my jaw and my eyes swells, and I am teary. I’m a sucker for a character that other people hate. And Mary has always been a favorite of mine. Not only after she finds her garden and makes friends and changes. I love her from page one. She may be cranky, but she’s also honest. She explores that terrifying house and its grounds with a delicious anticipation and openness, in spite of the fact that her life so far has sucked.

  When I finally remember to look up, my computer’s still pinging, Joe all desperate and wanting me to be there. Tabby?? You there? Tabitha? I’m missing you!!

  I kind of can’t believe I forgot about him for as long as I did. I have a distracting kind of liking for him. Sometimes I stare at my math homework for hours but can’t do a single problem, I’m so busy suffocating from feelings. But whoever wrote these margin notes captivates a different part of me.

  I turn back to the computer, and Joe and I swim in our special brand of awkward ecstasy for the next hour. We recall, for maybe the twentieth time this month, how we fell for each other. It’s one of our favorite conversations to have, the way mothers tell their children the stories of their births. I recount his smile and the zap of interest on the first day of school this year, how good he looked after a summer of football drills and beach days.