My mom, however, is not an idiot. She knew something was up. “Audrey?” she poked her head in my door. “Are you asleep?”
“Yes.”
“Somehow that answer doesn’t surprise me.” She opened the door a little bit more. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because you’re in bed at ten o’clock. And you didn’t eat a lot of dinner. And your fingernails look like they lost a bet with your teeth.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“So I shouldn’t be worried by your monosyllabic answers?”
“Not at all. See, there’s three syllables right there.”
Still, she came into the room and bent over the bed to kiss my forehead. “I love you, my crazy, music-obsessed daughter.”
“Love you, too.”
“You sure everything’s all right?”
This is what I wanted to say: “No, everything’s not all right, it’s a mess, and I made out with a hot guy who turned out to be really mean and then pictures got posted online and girls think I’m a slut and the entire nation is singing about my love life and my best friend is totally in love with a great guy and they’re going to get married and they’ll leave me all alone and I’ll be so depressed that I won’t get into college and I’ll end up being one of those creepy wrinkly old women who try to get backstage at hair-metal shows and hook up with roadies! So if you could just do that great Mom Thing you do where you fix everything and make it better, that would be perfect, okay? Is that good?”
But this, of course, is what I said: “Everything’s fine.”
It’s the worst thing to be the best liar.
16 “To me my life, it just don’t make any sense….”
—The Strokes, “Barely Legal”
I HAD THOUGHT that Monday morning would be more of the same, just like after “Audrey, Wait!” premiered on the radio and everyone was all interested in me. I figured that people would be even more curious and Sharon Eggleston would flip her hair a few extra times and Tizzy would pop a blood vessel in her eye from sheer excitement and that sort of thing.
Ha.
By 10 A.M., I knew things were different. It was like people were afraid to talk to me, even people I had known since junior high. When I walked through the front door, there were clusters of people just watching me, staring like I was parting the Red Sea instead of going to first period.
Also, five different girls had homemade arm huggies on.
But what really sealed the weirdness deal was that Tizzy had suddenly gone shy. She was the first girl I saw with arm huggies, and of course, they were made from her dad’s work socks and looked kind of wrong and wrinkly, but when I made eye contact with her, she got red and flustered.
This would not do at all. If anyone had the right to be all red and flustered, it was me, not Tizzy.
“Hey!” I said, running after her once class ended. I was going to ask her what was up, why no one was talking to me, but I got my answer without asking the question.
“Oh, hi,” she said, and a huge goofy smile came over her face. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
She couldn’t hold it in any longer. It was like watching a rocket launch. “Omigod, you made out with Simon Lolita!” She grabbed my arm and began jumping up and down, pinching me with every syllable. “I saw the pictures online last night—my mom said I couldn’t go online because I’m totally grounded right now, but she goes to bed so early so I snuck on the computer and Oh. My. God. I saw you and him kissing!”
Blastoff.
Beads of sweat were forming on her upper lip and her cheeks were crimson with excitement. “We’ve never had, like, a real celebrity at school before!” she continued. “Oh my God, I don’t even know what to say! You’re famous and you’re, like, talking to me!”
“Tizzy, I’m not fam—”
“You are, though! Everyone’s talking about you! Everyone! In the girls’ bathroom this morning, everyone was saying that you’re sooo lucky, and a couple of girls were all jealous, but don’t worry, Aud, I told them that you totally deserve it and that Simon Lolita is lucky to have you and that you two are gonna be the cutest couple. Is it okay that I just called you Aud?”
“Tizzy.” My head was spinning just watching her. “Breathe.”
“Okay!”
“Try doing it right now.”
“I am, I am!” She waggled her hands in front of her. “Is he coming to the winter formal with you?!”
It was all I could do to keep from shaking her. “Tizzy. We’re not dating.”
“But you made out with him!”
“I’m incredibly aware of that. But we’re not dating. It was a one-time thing.”
“Is he a good kisser?”
My brief hesitation was all she needed. “I knew it! I knew he would be! Sharon Eggleston was all, ‘I bet he totally sucks,’ but I was like, ‘Nuh-uh, no way, he’s British.’”
Sharon Eggleston. Fuck. She lived for this sort of popularity uprising, just so she could be the one to squash it. If our school ever performed a play about the French Revolution, she could play the guillotine.
I finally managed to disentangle myself from Tizzy, but only because I was going to be late to history, and when I walked in, Sharon had saved me a seat next to her. “Hi, Audrey!” she waved. “Over here!”