Populazzi. Part 17

"I know! I know! It's crazy! He just looks at me in this way ... this 'You Are the Most Gorgeous Creature Alive and I Want to Devour You' way ... and my brain melts. Gone. Completely. Claude, if I hadn't had to get home, he could've gone further. I don't think I would've stopped him."

"You wouldn't have had s.e.x with him." It was a statement, not a question.

"No!" I said. "I mean, unless maybe he had something ... you know, like a condom..."

"Cara!" Claudia cried.

"I know! And it's not like I'm in love with him! What is wrong with me?"

Chapter Eighteen.

If something was wrong with me, it didn't take me long to stop caring. Nate and I "studied" every afternoon that week. After the first time, I didn't bother bringing my books-although maybe I could have used them to fan away the giant cloud of smoke that engulfed me every time I walked in.

That was really the only problem; Nate hadn't given up on making me a pothead. He talked constantly about my "gift" and what a crime it was to deny myself a high that some could only dream of achieving.

"And you're just a noob," he'd say. "That means it'll get even deeper."

If my high got any deeper, I was pretty sure I'd end up dead. Nate didn't get that. He hoped a good contact high would rope me in-hence the cloud of smoke when I entered.

Part of me was flattered. Sadly for Nate, getting high was life's peak experience. I figured he had to care about me a lot to want to share it with me so badly.

Still, he never let up, and I was tired of finding new ways to say no. Plus to me the "sweet perfume" of pot smoke smelled more like a combination of wet gra.s.s and cat pee.

By Wednesday I dreaded going into the house. Then I spent the first half hour there fighting with myself about whether to leave and never come back.

But then Nate would kiss me, and it felt so good that within seconds I wouldn't even notice the pot on his breath.

Claudia always snapped up her phone on the first ring when I called her from the car each evening on my way to Wegmans.

"s.e.x Addicts Anonymous, this is your sponsor speaking," she answered on Thursday.

"We have not had s.e.x!"

"Right, but you're hitting practically a base a day, which means by my calculations you'll have done the deed by this time next week."

"Okay-in baseball? Three bases. Four, with home plate."

"Whatever. So what happened today?"

The second she asked, I had a physical flashback and felt a s.h.i.+very jolt. It was so unexpected, I actually let out a scream.

"What?" Claudia wailed. "Is he there? Tell me he isn't there. That's just weird. And aren't you driving?"

"No, he's not here! I was just remembering. It was kind of ... big today."

"It was big?"

"That's not what I mean. I mean, it was big. I think. Not that I've seen it ... Even if I had seen it, I have no basis for comparison, so I still wouldn't know, really-"

"I'm going to start playing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' on the phone keys unless you tell me exactly what happened right now."

"Okay, so you know how I said I was going to wear that stretchy skirt today?"

"Easy access," she confirmed.

"Right. Well ... he accessed."

"OH MY G.o.d!" Claudia screeched. A loud beep screamed in my ear.

"Ow! What was that?"

"That was my jaw hitting the floor. Or in this case, the pound key," Claudia said. "So was it ... you know ... good?"

"Yeah..."

"But?"

"No, it was good. It was. It was just really... intimate, you know? Almost too intimate. But I didn't think that until it was over. And then I just kind of wanted to cuddle up and wrap the comforter all around me."

Neither one of us said anything for a minute.

"Cair, are you okay?"

"Yeah! I mean, it felt incredible. Honestly, he didn't do anything I didn't really want him to."

"Swear on the Bell?"

"Swear on the Bell. Sorry, Claude, gotta run-Wegmans. I'll call you back after."

I thought about it while I did my quick-change act and decided I was making a big deal out of nothing. It wasn't like I was twelve. I was sixteen. Lots of sixteen-year-olds had actual s.e.x. The fact that I'd maybe gone a little further than I might have imagined I would was seriously no big deal. And I hadn't been lying to Claudia: It had felt amazing. Really amazing. And I'd wanted it in a huge way.

So there we were. I was fine. I was better than fine. I was great.

Except that night I couldn't sleep at all.

It wasn't what we'd done that bothered me. It was Nate, and the way I was with Nate. We never talked. At all. Okay, yes, we talked about music, and we talked about pot, and we talked about how much he wanted me to hear his music and smoke his pot, but we didn't talk about anything real. And that was cool when we were just hanging out, but now we'd had this really deep, intense physical experience. But without the other stuff it felt kind of ... empty.

I desperately needed to know how Nate felt about me, but even the idea of asking made me burn with embarra.s.sment. Too lame and sad-little-puppy. And I was sure anything Nate did feel would evaporate the minute I asked.

If I wanted to know Nate's feelings, I had to test them.

Since I wasn't Claudia, my test wasn't baroque. The next day, Friday, I simply didn't go out to the rock at lunchtime. Not right away and not after my usual lag time. I forced myself to stay in my car and eat my Zone bar with teeny, tiny bites, chewing thirty times before I swallowed. It was meditative, actually, and gave me something to concentrate on other than how Nate might-or might not-be reacting to my absence.

With five minutes left to the period, I hunkered down in my beast of a pea coat and made my way to the rock. My heart pounded. I glued my eyes to each skeletally leafless tree I pa.s.sed, stretching time before I'd see what I wasn't sure I wanted to know: whether or not Nate had cared enough to leave the rock and look for me.

My insides deflated when I saw him, same as always, playing his guitar without a care in the world. I had another physical flashback to last night, but this time I didn't feel a s.h.i.+very jolt. I felt stupid and embarra.s.sed.

I was close enough now for Nate to notice. He smiled up at HIT a me. Hey.

Normally, this was when he'd pull me close for a kiss, but I purposely stood out of his reach. He beckoned for me to come closer, but I didn't move. For the first time with Nate, I didn't have to concentrate on squelching my normal curly-haired energy. I had never felt less curly and bouncy than I did now.

"You don't look worried." I tried to sound nonchalant, but even I could hear the bitterness in my words. Not cool, but I couldn't help it.

"About what?"

"I always meet you during fifth period. Today I didn't."

He looked at me pointedly, clearly noting that I was indeed right there in front of him during fifth period. The fact that he was right didn't make me any less upset.

"Okay, I'm here now, but didn't you wonder where I was? What if I'd been sick, or hurt?"

"You weren't," Nate said.

"Yeah, but I could have been!" I screeched just as the bell rang. Without a word, Nate rose and strode toward the building. Halfway there he turned and looked back at me.

"I'm around later if you want to come over and study," he said, then kept walking.

I was floored. Seriously, I couldn't have been more offended if he'd asked if I wanted to go drown puppies. He didn't get it! Like I would actually want to go wade through pot smoke and get half-naked with him when he didn't care about me at all!

My shock didn't wear off. I spent the rest of the afternoon with my mouth hanging open. Our whole situation-our whole relations.h.i.+p, if that's what you could call it, which clearly you couldn't-was exactly what I'd feared. No matter how close we were physically, emotionally I meant absolutely nothing to Nate. But did that matter to him? Did that stop him? No. Nate Wetherill was evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. By the end of seventh-period AP U.S. history I had proof. Know what you get when you rearrange the letters in Nate Wetherill? HATE WILL ENTER.

Halfway through eighth-period physics, I had transformed my pencil and some paper clips into an excellent Nate Wetherill voodoo doll and was mercilessly grinding another paper clip into its groin. The whole enterprise felt immensely satisfying.

"Cara Leonard!" called Mr. Feinhorn. "Why does that not disprove Einstein's theory of relativity?"

Uh-oh. Apparently we were in the middle of a lecture, but I hadn't heard a single word of it. I palmed the voodoo doll and racked my brain for any information that didn't have to do with my undying animosity toward Nate. I found none.

"Um, because ... because..." I scrunched my whole face as if struggling for the answer. I practically broke a sweat.

Mr. Feinhorn wasn't impressed. He sighed, then called on Seth Minkoff, who dutifully responded, "Because it was an invalid test."

"Yes," said Mr. Feinhorn. " That is the answer, Cara. It was an invalid test."

Mr. Feinhorn looked me in the eye as he said it, and suddenly I understood. Not the Einstein stuff-I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about there. But the invalid test- that made sense. Nate had failed an invalid test. He and I hadn't made specific plans to meet at the rock today, so it's not like I'd actually missed a set appointment. Sure, I usually met him there, but I had the freedom to show or not show as I pleased. Nate wasn't possessive that way. That was a good thing, wasn't it? And even when I laid into him, it's not like he'd dumped me or said he didn't want to see me. He told me I should come over and study. When I looked at it that way, Nate actually came closer to pa.s.sing my test than failing.

Maybe testing Nate wasn't the best way to find out if he really cared about me. I still thought asking it outright was awful and lame and worthy of the kind of are u mad @ me? notes friends pa.s.sed around in seventh grade. But maybe there was a subtler option. Maybe I could just ask about him, about his mom, about his dad or his brother or his life. Then he'd ask about me, and we'd talk and I'd know there was actually something real between us, and I wouldn't feel so hollow about everything else we were doing.

So after school I went to his place to study.

"Hi," I said, and before Nate could even try to offer me a smoke, I added, "I was hoping today we could talk."

"About what?"

"I don't know ... anything. About you. Maybe about your mom."

Nate grimaced like he smelled a skunk. "Ouch. Buzzkill."

"Well, yeah, but-"

Nate was no longer listening. Instead he was lighting up.

Okay, Mom was too painful. I could respect that.

"How about you decide what we talk about," I said. "It doesn't even have to be about you. You can ask me something. Anything. Anything you want."

Nate smiled and put his hands on my waist, slipping his fingers under my s.h.i.+rt.

"Anything I want?" he said.

His fingers traced up my body toward my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, both of which had clearly turned treasonous on me, because they were screaming for Nate's hands to keep climbing.

I stepped back.

"I'm serious," I said. "I don't want to fool around. I want to talk. It's important to me."

Nate opened his eyes wide, tilted his head back, and made a groaning sound like a giant garbage truck stuck between gears.

What was he doing? Had I pressed his self-destruct b.u.t.ton? Who made noises like that?

Finally Nate pulled himself back from whatever brink he was on. He smiled and nodded, like he'd just solved a mystery.

"Ooh," he said. "I get it."

He took my hand and pulled me close. He kissed my neck, then whispered in my ear. "You're raggin' it. It's cool; it doesn't freak me out. I have my red badge of courage."

That was it.

"I gotta go," I said. I pulled away and darted to the door, already dialing Claudia on my cell.

"Beast with Two Backs Hotline," she answered. "You're calling early."

"I just broke up with Nate," I said.

Claudia's voice screamed into my ear with the impact of a major collision. "You WHAT? "

Chapter Nineteen.