The Art of Chasing Normal, page 16
“In fact…” Chloe got up and pulled a bag from her desk. “I made you something. Although I had no idea there was that much churning inside you.”
I sat, sliding to the edge of her bed. But before she could open the bag, I touched her shoulder. “Hey, I’m sorry for saying that stuff about your relationship with Taylor.”
Chloe waved a hand. “No, in a way, you were right. It’s important to make time for my friends, and speakerphone doesn’t count. Anyway, I shouldn’t have pressured you with the whole guy thing.”
“Just so you know, Marcus is not my type. At all.”
“Yes, and I couldn’t be happier.” She grabbed me in a quick hug before pulling out a T-shirt from the bag. “Here. I made you this.”
As I unfolded it, I read the T-shirt, Vent-me a latte.
“Now, it’s just a suggestion, you know, about opening up more.” Chloe reassured me with a smile. “No pressure.”
Technically, Chloe was right about venting and volcanic eruptions. Sure, she had no problem speaking her mind, and the good thing about that was at least I always knew where I stood with her. No questions. No wondering what she thought. I didn’t really know the right way to go about it for me. Somehow, I kept messing it up. Either I held it all in, or I exploded. I needed to find a happy middle.
How was I supposed to express my huge and out of control feelings for Zac, in a measured and controlled way?
Chapter 28
Be wary of defining your friendship in seventeen syllables
That night was open mic night, and I was nervous. Zac and I usually went home together afterwards, and I imagined it would be the perfect opportunity for the Big Talk. Even though I figured we needed to, I was kind of sick of big talks, especially after having them with Chloe, Joy, and my mom. I felt drained. In fact, I almost turned around when I got to Maple Avenue, but once I saw Zac through the window, I couldn’t. Apparently being around Zac, even if it meant the imminent Big Talk, was better than not seeing him at all.
As soon as I walked in the door, Zac spotted me and practically killed me with his smile. And like that, my mind went to the night before. My memory was patchy, but I definitely remembered our hug, the smell of roasted marshmallows, and most of all, how desperately I wanted to kiss him.
Weak-kneed at the suggestion of kissing Zac, I carefully made my way over to the counter, where he was busy juggling a ton of orders.
“Isn’t this crazy?” He nodded at the bigger than usual crowd, while spooning foamed milk onto a latte.
“Did you guys advertise for open mic night this week?”
“My dad’s idea.” He shrugged. “So how’s everything at home?”
“Okay. I had a deep meaningful conversation with my mom today.” The whole conversation left me somewhat hollow inside, which now only made the butterflies—the ones that launched into flight the moment I saw Zac—feel even more prominent. How would I feel after Zac and I finally discussed everything? After tonight, we would draw the boundary lines, and all I could do was hope that our friendship would survive. That our friendship would always be our package deal.
“How’s the hangover?”
“Better.” I smiled a little, scrunching my nose.
“Good.” His gaze managed to stay on mine as he worked. My stomach tumbled, and I reminded myself he was my best friend. He would always have my best interests at heart. It wasn’t love. At least not the kind I hoped for. I took a deep breath and turned to look at the stage. Might as well enjoy the moment, one last bask in the fever of my crush. It was all I had left.
The guy with the guitar played. I scanned the bobbing and swaying crowd, and noticed Tina. I was about to head in her direction, when the musician finished, and Zac pushed his way toward the stage.
“Hey, big shout out to Gavin on guitar,” Zac said into the mic, pausing as the crowd cheered. “This is open mic night, so warm your vocals, and drag out your comedy. The mic is yours. But first, I’m going to start with a Higher Grounds tradition, a haiku.”
I was a little surprised. There were a lot of people in the room. Zac wasn’t exactly afraid of public speaking (not like me), but he was used to doing the haikus to a much, much smaller crowd. But things had changed for him around Higher Grounds, and it looked like his family life had improved. In fact, it seemed lately, he was usually in a good mood, so I assumed he was on a natural high. Either that or he started drinking espresso.
“A double haiku,” Zac said, and someone whistled.
Or maybe he downed double espressos.
Zac cleared his throat.
“Pinks,” he said, after leaning into the microphone. “This is for you.”
My mouth fell open. He wrote a haiku for me? Okay, so maybe it wasn’t completely unusual. He usually wrote them for me—and Chloe, but they were always movie riddles.
But he didn’t usually dedicate a haiku, not specifically, not like that. Forget double espressos, he must’ve chewed whole coffee beans. I shuffled backwards, until I was pressed up against the furthest wall. Zac hadn’t mentioned my actual name to the crowd, but I felt nervous.
“A girl scaled a tree,” he said, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. “Fearless but stopped by eight legs.”
The crowd laughed, startling me. I looked around, feeling confused not only by Zac, but by the lighthearted reactions to his haiku. I was on the edge of fear. But I couldn’t move. I felt weighted and heavy inside. I stared at Zac on the stage like he was the creature with eight furry legs.
“Petals fall to me.”
Suddenly I pictured the flower I’d shoved behind my ear before making my way across the branch all those years ago. Those petals symbolized some serious over confidence on my part.
Zac searched the crowd and stopped on me. Everything inside me froze—all of it waiting to hear what he would say next.
“Then a stolen kiss…”
Stolen kiss? He was talking about the Lord of the Cringe Kiss. In public. A rush of heat covered my face, and the blood pounded noisily in my ears. The sounds of the coffee shop—the hiss of the steamer, laughter, and Zac’s voice—they muted. Temporary deafness. It was to my advantage, seeing as I didn’t want to hear another word of his haiku. Was this Zac’s idea for the Big Talk? Do it in the form of a poetry slam, and it could be funny and painless?
No way would he do that. Except he was, wasn’t he? The only reason I could come up with was that Zac didn’t know I had a crush on him. Except then I didn’t understand why he’d asked to talk to me after our awkward dance at the wedding. Was it possible he didn’t get how entangled my feelings for him actually were?
What was I thinking? Of course he didn’t, because I’d never said anything. Maybe he was still where I was in the beginning of the whole Lord of the Cringe Kiss mess, thinking it was just a case of misfiring emotions, something silly and unwanted, something to laugh at and dismiss. It was all my fault we weren’t on the same page, because I kept it all bottled. I even sidestepped Zac more than once when he tried to clear the air. If Zac knew my true feelings, well, I was positive he wouldn’t be up there sharing his haiku. He’d never intentionally slam me. In fact, if the Lord of the Cringe Kiss was truly an accident, and I never actually meant to kiss him, then we’d both be laughing about it, which explained why Zac made light of it now. Because he clearly believed my kiss was a big accidental, silly mistake.
“She loves me, she loves me not…”
My heart fell, spiraling downward, like a bird with a broken wing. The noise and whistling faded away. I turned and pushed my way through the crowd. Would he actually say something like, He loves her, he loves her not? Out loud? It was a nauseating thought, and I didn’t stick around to find out. I felt like I was on the verge of having another volcano moment, so before I exploded, I left out the closest door.
I was in the alley, breathing like I was having an allergy attack, when Zac came out a few minutes later. “Pinks?”
I spun around. He looked concerned. “Hey... Are you okay?”
“No, not really,” I said, for once actually saying what I felt.
“Oh.”
Zac’s forehead wrinkled. He was confused, which made sense, because he didn’t know how deep my feelings for him ran. He didn’t know that ignoring and joking about the kiss wouldn’t work for me. He didn’t know that his haiku made me his silly, little lovesick muse. But all of this was my fault. He didn’t know. Because I never told him.
“Zac, I should’ve said something when it first happened.”
“No, Grace, I should’ve-”
“I wish we could’ve saved it for the talk on the walk home.”
“Oh,” he said, his face sliding into neutral. Did he get it now? “Sorry, I got caught in the moment. The crowd, the caffeine, and well, I thought about the movie haiku and those big gesture things in the movies...”
I waved a hand and shook my head. Sure, Zac was a movie guy, but apparently, it was only the fictional guy character in those movies who actually understood the big gesture concept. A girl didn’t want to get the we’re-better-off-as-friends speech (even if he didn’t know that was what he gave me), especially not in the form of a grand and public gesture.
I folded my arms to stop my hands from shaking, but I couldn’t do anything about the blood pounding in my ears. In fact, it was so loud, it was like Zac talked to me from the end of a tunnel. But, I wasn’t really focusing in too much on his words. It was too humiliating.
“Pinks, after our dance…no, in the car last night…”
My face burned. In the car? Well, I was drunk. I must’ve said something that made him feel it was okay to make a haiku about it. Obviously, I didn’t declare my feelings, because then Zac wouldn’t have made a joke about it. So I said, “It’s okay Zac. It wasn’t like what you said was totally a surprise, I knew how you felt.”
Zac pushed his hand through his hair. Did he feel guilty? I wasn’t sure, but he took a step toward me, and I swear he was about to give me a hug or something.
My gut contracted, feeling like it folded in half. I felt nauseous.
“Wait,” I said, retreating. I couldn’t let him touch me. His haiku made it clear we were friends and always would be, but I wasn’t ready to hear that yet, especially not coupled with a touch or worse, a friendly hug. “I can’t.”
Something moved across Zac’s face like a shadow. I figured Zac saw how deep my attraction for him ran, and I imagined he felt bad he couldn’t return that. Even my heart slowed a bit, realizing it no longer needed to pound its way out of my chest to declare itself to Zac. I only hoped Zac wouldn’t feel so guilty about the haiku, simply because he misjudged the gravity of my sensitive state. I knew Zac would never intentionally hurt me.
“You didn’t mean it, Zac.”
His gaze shifted. He stared at the pile of crushed packing boxes in the alley. He seemed a little grim, his jaw rigid, but he turned back.
“Okay,” he said, shrugging slightly. His voice was soft, almost like his breath was somewhere else. He looked at me, directly into my eyes, and my traitorous feet wanted to take off running into his arms. “I guess I made a mistake.”
Everything in me stilled.
Then the rest of the weekend went by in a big blur of blah, like I was recovering from the flu. The emotional, unrequited love flu. Still, it was real how my muscles ached and my head throbbed, and I suddenly understood how a crush defined my feelings, because I felt like it squeezed the life right out of me.
Chapter 29
See Jane make a massive, gelatinous mistake
On Monday, the entire Blue Pride Newspaper staff got a lecture from Principal Dupree, and it was all my fault. The newspaper with my special full page layout advertising the Halloween Pageant, the one delivered that morning, had one big problem.
I’d turned in the wrong layout.
I don’t know how it happened exactly, but instead of the photo of the mayor handing over the Green Project grant check to Principal Dupree, I accidentally sent the edited picture of Kristen in her red bikini, my digitally created version of “fat” Kristen spilling out of her teeny-weeny Carmen bikini in a spectacle of gelatinous glory.
“I know I don’t have to tell you that this is completely unacceptable.” Mr. Dupree pointed at the offending stack of papers on the table. “I’m quite surprised this kind of action even came from this staff.”
I opened my mouth to apologize again, but Kong shot me a warning look, because, apparently, everyone was sick of hearing me say sorry, especially since the entire staff felt Kristen deserved it, karmic-ly speaking.
Even Mr. Dupree’s long suffering sigh, gave me pause that he thought Kristen had something coming after the Jane posters, not that he’d ever admit that. It wasn’t like he’d been able to reprimand her for the poster thing, especially when she assured him she thought that Jane was my name. What could he say? That Kristen needed to make sure she knew the names of all eight hundred people in the school? That she needed to make a purpose of getting to know all those outside of her social strata?
Whatever.
“I expect much better behavior out of you all. You can take a cue from your victim in this case.” He coughed into his hand. He probably had a hard time considering Kristen as a victim. “Miss Thorne was very gracious about the mistake.”
It was true. Kristen had acted, well, rather polite about the whole matter, much like a runner up in a beauty pageant. She completely accepted my apology, graciously, like our principal said. Although, she commented that it wasn’t like she really was fat. Which, of course, was true, if not the point. It pained me to apologize, however, but I reminded myself I didn’t need any bad karma trailing me.
After the staff meeting, Zac and I were alone in the newspaper room.
“So, that was crazy, right?” I asked, hovering next to the table where Zac sat.
He didn’t respond. Hunched over his laptop, he tapped quickly at the keyboard. We still hadn’t said a word to each other since the mess in the alley, and as the silence wore on, I thought that maybe what I’d said made things worse. I was terrible at the whole venting thing, obviously, because now we weren’t talking at all. So I tried to start a conversation with something neutral.
“Hey, I’m really sorry about the layout. I didn’t mean to send that photo in. With everything going on, I screwed up.” I picked at a sticker on the edge of the table. It read, Vamps. Kristen’s handiwork. She was everywhere.
Zac stopped typing, but he didn’t look at me.
“It’s my responsibility. My fault. I’m the editor,” he said, resuming his typing.
“You’re mad? About the paper?” I swallowed. The rest of the Blue Pride staff had laughed about it. Even Mr. Dupree didn’t seem all that concerned. Besides, Kristen didn’t care, so why did he?
Zac sat back from his keyboard. “You know? I’m pissed at myself for not double-checking what you turned in, but I’m also mad because I thought, well, it was you. I trusted you. It never occurred to me you’d do something like this. This is beneath you. It’s something Kristen would do.”
He shook his head and glanced at my fingers, which still picked at the stupid sticker. I stopped, curling my hand into a fist.
“Still, it was my job to check your work,” he said.
I was more than a little shocked to feel Zac’s anger aimed at me. I knew I’d messed up, but other than the principal, I was only worried about Kristen’s reaction to the stupid fat photo. Maybe it should’ve occurred to me that it might affect Zac as editor in chief. “But Mr. Dupree said he wouldn’t take any action, so the paper is okay. No one thinks you had anything to do with this. Everyone knows it’s totally my fault.”
Zac didn’t say anything.
“You know I didn’t do this on purpose, right?”
Zac shrugged. He picked up a paper, as if he tested its weight, before tossing it back on the pile. “I can’t figure you out anymore. I feel like you’re avoiding me, and I have no idea what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. You change your hair color like every week.”
“My hair?” My hand fluttered to my head as if to check to see if it was still there.
Zac waved away his comment. “No. I don’t know. It’s just that my job here at the paper, as a reporter, is to get people to talk, to open up, but with you I can’t, Grace. Not anymore anyway.”
I flinched. This wasn’t like talking about my ridiculous crush and saying we’re just friends. Zac said he didn’t get me at all, and it actually jarred me to hear him call me Grace, instead of Pinks. For the first time ever, I felt like Zac and I were miles apart, and it scared me more than anything that happened before. I could probably handle getting over a crush but not losing his friendship completely.
“I know things have been crazy for you with your family, and I know how hard it is to deal with the chaos, but you’ve basically shut me out, and I have no clue what’s going on with you.” He turned, staring at the scattered papers on the desk.
I opened my mouth to say something, but closed it. What could I say?
“Every week you brought me your layouts, and I felt like I was looking for you in them. I can’t figure it out, and I’m left guessing. Okay, maybe it was stupid for me to do the open mic, but you said something in the car that night. Well, I thought…” He cleared his throat. “No, I assumed… Just like I assumed I didn’t need to check your work. My mistake.”
What had I said in the car? “Zac, I was drunk, I didn’t ...”
But I stopped because Kong and a few other staff members filed into the room, laughing, presumably still about my layout. Zac nodded in their direction, a little too seriously. Then he said to me, “You don’t have to explain. I get it now.”
But I didn’t. I went home and cried and, when I caught a glimpse of myself in my mirror, I remembered Zac’s comment about my hair. I wasn’t unrecognizable. My hair was almost back to its natural color. Almost. Every time I washed it, I saw a little bit more of my real color, its beigy self slowly revealing as the dark faded.
