Shutout Page 8

  Fortunately for me, Mom gave me something to get mad about so I didn’t have to focus all my energy on feeling guilty. “I’ll call Rachel then,” Mom said.

  “What?” I nearly screamed. “You can’t call Lena’s mom! You can’t!”

  “Not only can I, I have to. She’s my friend, Amanda. Did you really think I could keep this from her?”

  “But now Lena’s going to be mad at me for getting her in trouble! This is so not fair! I never would have told you if I had known you were going to get her in trouble too!”

  “Just another example of not thinking things through tonight, I guess.”

  “But”—I was yelling now, and crying too—“she’s going to hate me! You’re going to kill our friendship!”

  “She’s not going to hate you,” Mom said. “Maybe she’ll be mad, but she won’t hate you. It looks like she was going to get mad at you one way or the other. Maybe it would have been better if she got mad at you because you refused to go to the party.”

  “You don’t understand anything!” I yelled. “I did the right thing! I told you! And you’re punishing me for doing the right thing!”

  Mom shook her head. “Amanda. Who ever told you doing the right thing was easy?”

  5

  I went to Lena’s locker on Monday morning, but she was already walking away down the hall. There were a lot of people around, so I didn’t want to yell or go running after her, especially if she was going to ignore me or be mean to me. I put a note in her locker: “I’m so sorry! Mom found out and I begged her not to call. I’m grounded from everything for the next month. U? Love, your best friend, Amanda.”

  I hoped that writing “best friend” there would make it still be true. But when I got to lunch, I was pretty sure that she saw me come in the door and turned away to talk to Duncan. I didn’t think butting in on them would help my case any.

  Besides, Shakina was sitting right there, and she smiled and waved and said, “Namaste, bitch!”

  “Namaste, bitch!” I called back, and sat down with her.

  “So how was the party?” Shakina asked.

  “Nightmare. Total and complete nightmare. I sat there and watched boring people get drunk while Lena made out with a boy and then I got caught sneaking in”—I didn’t want to admit that I’d been so wimpy about lying to my parents. God, I’d folded at the first sign of guilt. I was never going to be any good at being a teenager—“and I got grounded for like forever. I don’t get my phone back for a month.”

  “Whoa. That sucks.”

  “Yeah, that’s really the only bad part. I still get to go to soccer and yoga, and it’s not like there are so many parties I’m dying to go to anyway. But yeah, it sucks.”

  “Did Lena at least apologize to you?”

  “For what?”

  “For getting you in trouble! Didn’t you do this whole thing for her?”

  “Yeah, but . . . but. No.”

  Shakina shook her head. “Well, I’m glad you get to go to yoga anyway,” she said. “I was afraid you were gonna make me do the dead bug all by myself.”

  I was glad too. But not so glad that I could stop worrying about Lena and whether she was mad at me. I finally caught up to her in the locker room before practice.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.” Yep. She was mad.

  “I’m sorry. You know I had no idea that I was going to get you in trouble, right?”

  She whipped her head around and hissed at me. “No, Amanda, I don’t know that. I don’t know a lot of things. I thought you were my best friend, but you stabbed me in the back because you were jealous.”

  I stood there with my mouth hanging open for a minute before I could speak. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re jealous of me and Duncan, you’re jealous that I made varsity and you didn’t, and so you deliberately got me in trouble to sabotage me!”

  “I . . . how could you even think that? I would never do that! I just couldn’t lie to my mom’s face, and—”

  “Oh, that was a great touch. Perfect little Amanda is honest with her parents, while bad Lena gets caught.”

  “You know, I got grounded too!”

  “Like it matters. You don’t have anywhere to go! How am I supposed to be Duncan’s girlfriend if I can’t even talk to him on the phone?”

  She’d just thrown every one of my failures in my face, and she was gloating about Duncan, so I said something I probably shouldn’t have: “Can the kid even put two coherent sentences together? What kind of phone conversations could you possibly have? ‘Gee, Lena, I really like you!’ ‘Gee, Duncan, I really like me too! We’re perfect together!’ ”

  We had long since stopped being quiet, and when I looked around, I realized that a crowd had gathered to watch us yell at each other. I felt stupid, and mean, besides. I had been jealous of her. Was I trying to sabotage her chances with Duncan without even realizing it? I didn’t think so. But I couldn’t say for sure.

  But Lena could.

  “Bitch,” she said, and turned away and kept dressing.

  It’s kind of funny how hearing that word from Shakina just a couple of hours earlier had been funny, but now, spit out of Lena’s mouth at me like that, it hurt worse than if she’d slapped me.

  It was incredibly bizarre to be standing there in the locker room and thinking this was the moment that the best friendship I’d ever had ended. I really thought I had done the right thing when I told my mom the truth, but now I wasn’t sure anymore. It didn’t feel like there had ever been a right thing to do—just a bunch of wrong things.

  I stood there stunned for a minute, then trotted out to the field, my eyes completely dry. Later, maybe much later, I would cry about this, but there was no way I was going to let Lena see how badly she’d hurt me.

  I think every one of my teammates was probably thankful for Sever’s disease that afternoon, because if I’d been able to run, I would have plowed through anybody who got in my way, and it might have been people instead of soccer balls that got pummeled. As it was, I had a shutout for the scrimmage. I wasn’t letting so much as a mosquito get into my goal.

  “Great intensity,” Beasley said to me afterward. “Everything okay?”

  And because I was tired and dripping sweat and I had grass stains on my legs from diving after balls, I answered, “Yeah, except for being grounded and losing my best friend, everything’s just peachy keen.”

  Beasley did not do that annoying thing that a lot of adults do when they hear about kids’ problems—that sort of frown that’s really a smile that basically says isn’t it cute that you have such silly problems. She didn’t tell me I’d get over it or that it wasn’t so bad. All she said was “I’m sorry. I know how hard that is.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll get through it. I’m tough as an old boot.” I thought maybe saying it might make it true.

  “I don’t doubt it, Amanda,” Beasley said. She gave me a kind smile and walked away.

  I grabbed my stuff and headed home without showering, figuring I could be gross and smelly on the two-block walk home and shower there. That way I could avoid Lena and all the spectators who’d be hoping that Round 2 would start after practice.

  Now that I was alone on the street, I started to cry. I just felt like my whole life had fallen apart. Everything I thought I was—good at soccer, Lena’s best friend, a daughter who made her parents proud instead of crazy—all that was gone. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I missed my old self. I liked being that person.

  I was so absorbed in my misery that I didn’t hear the bike coming up behind me. I only heard Conrad’s voice bellowing, “I just want you to know when you walk with the ball under your arm like that, it’s really, really tempting to knock it out, but I know you’re in a bad mood, so I’m not doing it.”

  I sniffled and turned to look at him. He was smiling, but I didn’t feel like smiling. “Yeah, well, thanks for that,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “I mean,
I know going through school with that face all day can’t be easy on you.” He started to pedal away, but when he saw my unhappy expression, he got off his bike and walked next to me for a while without talking. It was nice, but annoying at the same time.

  “So you should tell me next time you want to sneak out,” Conrad said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like the idea of you being at a party like that by yourself.”

  “Well, I was with Lena.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not much consolation. Jeez, I can’t believe I used to like her.” If only he’d told her, my life would be awkward because my best friend was dating my brother instead of because my best friend hated me. “Anyway,” Conrad continued, “you really shouldn’t go to parties like that without—”

  “A chaperone?” I barked.

  “Nah. Forget it,” he said. I wanted to yell at him that I was fourteen years old and I didn’t need him to protect me, but it was kind of sweet in a dumb, sexist way, and since Conrad was one of the few people in my life who wasn’t pissed off at me, I decided to let it slide.

  “I just mean,” he said, “that I’m way better at lying to Mom and Dan than you are.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, I guess it would be hard to be any worse than me.”

  When we got home I showered and did homework and ate dinner and did some more homework. Homework seemed even more boring than usual because I couldn’t punctuate it with quick calls and messages to Lena. Even though I probably got it done faster, it still felt like it took forever.

  Dad was giving me the deep freeze too, which also made it weird to be in the house. It actually made being grounded a lot worse. Normally if Mom or Dad was being odd for some reason, I would have run to Lena’s house. Now I had to sit there and feel the disappointment rolling off him.

  At least my brothers were being cool. Whenever one of us is in trouble, we all pull together. So Conrad gave me an evening off from teasing, and Dominic gave me the evening off from annoyances. The three of us actually sat there and played a game of Crazy Eights that lasted for forty-five minutes and probably would have lasted longer if Dominic hadn’t had to run off and watch some TV show.

  So it was a slightly boring but conflict-free evening of sibling bonding, but I wasn’t really surprised at the end of it when the switch in my brain that allows me to fall asleep didn’t work again, and I just lay in bed thinking about how my heels hurt. I went downstairs and found Dad watching TV.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi,” Dad said, not turning his gaze away from his show.

  I sat down and watched for a minute. Some fishermen hauled a guy in a rubber monster suit on board and he killed them all. I don’t know how it is that Dad can always find the crappiest horror movie on any channel at any given time. I guess it’s a gift.

  After a period of awkward silence, I finally said, “So, are you going to stay mad at me forever?”

  And now Dad looked at me. “I’m not mad, Amanda. I am proud of you for telling the truth. I’m just kind of . . . Mom says I’m being stupid, but I thought maybe the fact that you and I had been through such a horrible time together would mean we wouldn’t have to do the whole adolescent war of attrition thing.”

  “Dad, it’s not . . . I shouldn’t have lied, but—”

  “Did it occur to you to ask?”

  “What? No! I mean, you would have said no, right?”

  “I know you well enough to know as soon as you signed that paper you wouldn’t take a drink. So going to a party when I know you’re not going to drink or get into a car with someone who’s drinking and you have your phone with you? I probably would have gone for it.”

  Dad was nuts. There was no way he would have said yes to that. “And then Mom would have had to call Rachel, and we wouldn’t have been able to go, and Lena would have been mad at me,” I objected.

  Now Dad looked at me like I was nuts. “But isn’t she mad at you anyway?”

  I watched as a humanoid from the deep claimed another victim on the TV. “You make a strong point, Father.”

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks around here,” he said, smiling.

  We watched the movie in silence for a while, but this silence was comfortable instead of awkward. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked.

  “Not as much as I’d like. Lots to worry about, you know. I have to make sure I get all my worrying time in, and I’m so busy during the day that I need to carve out a few hours at night.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “You. Conrad. Dominic. That’s mostly it right now, though of course there’s always financial stuff too.”

  “Well,” I said, getting off the couch—the crappiness of the movie had suddenly made me exhausted—“you don’t have to worry about me. I’m tough as an old boot, remember?”

  “I know you are. I love you, sweetie.”

  “I love you too, Daddy,” I said. I climbed the stairs to my room and got probably the best five hours of sleep I’d had in a week.

  6

  The rest of the month was weird, but not because I was grounded. It was weird because it was the first month in six years when Lena wasn’t my best friend. She seemed to be best friends with Courtney now, and Duncan was always all over her, so I guess he was willing to wait until she got her phone back. Since this was the main reason she had been mad at me, you’d think she might’ve cut me some slack. But you’d be wrong about that. She wouldn’t say hi to me or even acknowledge my existence in any way. Which really didn’t make her any different from any of the other girls on varsity or actually about 99 percent of the CHS student body, but still. In spite of everything, I expected better from her.

  The worst part was that for the first two weeks there was this gigantic Lena-shaped hole in my life. At least eight times a day something would happen that I thought I couldn’t wait to tell her, or I’d find myself bored in class and I’d get as far as turning to a blank page in my notebook to write her a note before I realized she wouldn’t be reading any notes from me.

  But then, as the days went by, the hole got smaller. It was definitely still there, but it shrank. I started to get used to having a life that didn’t include Lena.

  Kind of. In English class we started reading Romeo and Juliet, and we watched the movie and everybody got all gooey about how cool and romantic the whole thing was, and it seemed like Angus and I were the only ones in the whole class who weren’t impressed. Also, I finally understood why Dad was pissed about being Friar Lawrence while everybody else got the studly fighting roles.

  One day, after like the eighth girl had gone on about the beauty of tragic love, Angus finally spoke up. It was the first time he’d said anything in class outside of a small group, and everybody stared at him as he talked.

  “You know,” he said, his voice kind of shaking with anger, which was weird, but okay, whatever, “the tragedy here is just that these two are idiots. Romeo doesn’t have any idea what love is. He thought he was so in love with Rosaline until he sees some pretty girl at a party, and suddenly he neglects his best friend so he can be with a girl he talked to for five minutes. His selfishness and stupidity get Mercutio killed. Mercutio is literally willing to die for Romeo, and all Romeo can think about is some girl he just met. And then they kill themselves because they’re too stupid and selfish to think about any of the people they’re leaving behind.”

  “Well,” Mr. Gordon said, “that’s certainly a strong opinion. What does everybody else think?”

  Everybody else obviously thought the kid was a freak, but I was glad that for the first time somebody had put their finger on what bugged me about the play—that everybody feels bad for Romeo, when it’s really a tragedy for his neglected best friend. I said, maybe a little too loud, “I agree.”

  A couple of days later, I was walking toward the locker room when he came out of nowhere. “I wanted to say thanks,” he said.

  I just looked at him. “Um. For what?”
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  “For havin’ my back in English class. You know? Romeo and Juliet?”

  I stopped myself short of giving a laugh of surprise that might have hurt his feelings. The kid was thanking me for two words I said in class days ago! “Oh. No problem. I mean, you were right.”

  “Well, still, it was a nice thing you did. It was my brother,” he added.

  “What was?”

  “The dying young thing. He killed himself.”

  “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.”

  “I found him.”

  “Oh God.” What do you say to that? Nothing else but what I already said. “That’s awful.”

  “Yeah. I thought I owed you an explanation. Since you told me about your mom. Anyway, I gotta go. I just wanted to thank you.”

  “Any time,” I said. “I guess we’re kind of in the same club.”

  It took him a second to figure out what I meant. “Yeah,” he said. “Wish it was a better club.” And then he walked away. I half expected this to mean he would start popping up in the hallways and talking about death with me, but he didn’t. I saw him in class, and sometimes in the halls, but we’d just wave, and it never came up again.

  We had ten soccer games that month, usually with zero members of varsity cheering us on. We went 7 and 3, which was, as Beasley kept telling us, an awesome record that anybody could be proud of. (I allowed an average of 1.25 goals per game, not that anybody kept track of that.)

  And I guess we would have felt better about our record if varsity hadn’t gone 9–1 over the same stretch. They were a completely awesome soccer-playing machine. Geezer was still screaming at them all the time, and they never looked like they were having much fun, but they really could play. Lena was phenomenal, more than making up for Stephanie LoPresto’s deficits in goal. She had two hat tricks in that month. I’m not going to lie—it was pretty impossible for me to cheer for her. It’s not like I wanted anything bad to happen to her; it’s just that every time I tried to yell some encouragement, it stuck in my throat. Luckily, everybody on my team was taking notes on the games so they could have a hope of starting in the next one, so whenever Lena did something spectacular, I wrote in my notebook so it would look like I was just a really intent student of the game instead of an ex–best friend with a chip on her shoulder.