“Whatever. You hate her, too.”
My feelings toward Leah rarely approached hate. I classified them more as a studied indifference, with a side of banal dislike and a soupçon of fear.
“What’s she done to you?” I searched Helen’s face for any telltale signs of trouble. Something about this conversation didn’t feel like her normal dislike of Leah, which was usually more obligatory than deeply felt.
She looked at her studded black shoes, as though they would offer some answer to my question. Slouching down the wall didn’t help Helen shrink away from the question, and neither did her platforms. From the side, she looked like a stretched-out, curved comma, her legs sticking out far in front of her and her head hanging low.
“Nothing, I guess.” Her mopey, quiet reply didn’t sound like nothing.
She had to be lying. In my head, I flipped through all the things she could lie about. Maybe she liked Sean, despite all of their teasing and back-and-forth jabs that never ended. Or maybe going to school with Leah had brought this out.
“Do you like like Sean?” I scrutinized her face for any sign of emotion. She flinched slightly, but that was it. “Oh, my God! You do!”
“Ew!” Helen blurted. “No!”
I didn’t quite believe her, but something about her posture told me now wasn’t the time to press the issue.
“Then what’s the problem?” Now that she was a junior, Leah most likely wouldn’t pay much attention to freshmen girls, at least not until homecoming court nominations came around. Then again, Helen wasn’t an ordinary freshman. She was unusually pretty, and she spent a lot of time with Leah’s boyfriend. Two strikes, waiting for a third.
“I didn’t want to say anything because it’s your audition celebration and all, and I didn’t want to make it a big deal,” she said, sounding like whatever was bothering her was a big deal. “But someone’s been saying that I—” Helen looked toward the parking lot, and her voice trailed off. “Never mind.”
Leah’s purple Mazda Miata had just pulled in. Helen watched, lips pursed tight, as Sean and Leah climbed out and walked up to us.
As usual, Leah’s makeup was one step away from beauty pageant readiness: just enough mascara, just enough blush, and just enough lipstick that she didn’t creep over the edge from skillful application to full-on clown town. Platinum highlights streaked her long wavy blond hair. A tight Pepto-pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt exposed a two-inch gap of tanned skin between its hem and the top of her white denim cutoffs, which she’d rolled up to show off her muscular legs.
She looked like an extra on 90210. Compared to her, in my black T-shirt, frayed cutoffs, and Doc Martens, I looked like an extra in a Nirvana video.
Sean, under Leah’s fashion tutelage, looked nearly as preppy as she did in jeans and a baby blue polo shirt that complemented her pink one, a terrible choice for such hot weather. Somehow, I didn’t mind the preppy look on Sean, as long as he didn’t start popping his collar. It was better than his pre-Leah habit of alternating between Spider-Man T-shirts and LSU jerseys.
With a wave and joking pee-pee dance, Sean rushed inside the restaurant, leaving Helen and me alone with his girlfriend. My brain froze at the thought of conversation between me, Helen, and Leah, especially since my usually talkative sister had clammed up next to me.
In the year since they’d started dating, I’d tried to like Leah. Their whole relationship shocked me at first because Sean and I started high school at approximately the same level of popularity—that is, zero. Leah, on the other hand, had an entire entourage. So when she and some of the other cheerleaders started hanging out with Sean and his football buddies at school, I thought it was an extension of their symbiotically intertwined sports.
And then he asked her out, and she said yes.
At first, she didn’t seem that bad. She was much like all the other cheerleaders—interested in football, and rightly insistent that cheerleading was a sport. She seemed totally devoted to Sean, recognizing that he wasn’t just talented, but genuinely a good person. I’m sure it also helped that he was hot.
For a few months, she’d treated me as an almost friend—not necessarily someone you’d confide in, but someone you’d go to the movies with or hang out with in a group. I was happy to support her, too, because Leah had lost friends when she started dating Sean. My school didn’t have a lot of experience with interracial couples, especially one where the girl was a year older than the boy. People didn’t say anything to her, but they whispered. It didn’t even matter that Sean had incredible talent.
And then the football team won district. Suddenly she and Sean were the Couple of the Century, and I was back to being Sean’s weirdo friend from next door who never got invited to the jock parties, a sad reminder of the geeky life whence she’d rescued him.
“Hi, Athena,” Leah said, showing her whiter-than-white teeth in a sharky smile. “How was your audition?”
“Okay.” I shrugged. “Second chair. But considering no one else from our school’s orchestra made the cut except me and Melissa, that’s pretty good.”
“Pretty good,” she said, like it was the exact opposite. I had to give it to her—her use of sarcasm was much subtler than Helen’s. I could feel my cheeks start to burn with embarrassment and failure, solely because she’d uttered two devastating words.
Next to me, Helen sank farther down the wall, stuck in giant comma mode.
“Hi, Helen,” Leah said, turning with laser-like precision. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“I bet you have.” Helen didn’t look up. “Considering we’ve known each other for over a year now.”
“Ha. I was thinking, like, more along the lines of at school.”
Helen’s face flushed a deep pink that stood out against the sprinkling of summer freckles on her cheeks. I didn’t know what had happened at school or why Helen would act this way. Then again, I’d spent the past three days trying to figure out who the new guy in physics and calc was, and no one else seemed to know the answer to that, either. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Helen—the latest gossip tended to fly below my radar.
“If you think—”
“Think what?” Leah asked in an overly innocent voice while winding her hair around her finger like a little girl. She was so infuriating.
I found myself slouching against the wall next to Helen, trying to figure out if something I could say would make this conversation better. My downward slide seemed to trigger something in Helen. She straightened up to her full height, which, with the giant shoes, reached over six feet, towering over Leah.
“You know, it’s not important.” She smiled at Leah, broad and confident.