Page 43 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
Lily stood there, looking confused as she watched Rhett rubbing one slow circle after the next. “I get it,” she said, trying to smile as if she were in on the joke, but the smile wobbled uncertainly.
“Do you?” Livvie asked, leaning forward with an intense expression. “I’m so glad.”
Lily nodded and gave a small wave before she hurried back to her table of friends.
“I wonder what she’s going to tell them?” Bran said.
Rhett was still rubbing my back. Did he realize that? Because each circle he made burned. I could feel the stares on us. One girl elbowed another and made a circling motion, then pointed to us. The other girl’s eyes widened, and I dropped my eyes down to the table. Rhett’s touch felt weird,goodweird, but the attention didn’t. I cleared my throat. “She’s gone. You can stop now.”
He looked surprised and withdrew his hand to reach for his Coke. Livvie glared at me. I cursed myself for being an idiot and picked up my po-boy. I took another bite, but for the first time ever, it didn’t taste that great to me. I kept eating anyway so I would have an excuse not to talk. I didn’t know what to say.
Rhett tried to smooth over the awkward moment. “I wish I had known that playing four songs in a tiny New Orleans jazz club was all I needed to become a rock star. I’d have done it forever ago.”
We all laughed. I hoped none of them noticed how forced my laugh was.
Livvie asked Rhett a question about their history assignment and he answered, but he sounded subdued. The next ten minutes were like that, with me saying nothing, Bran rambling to fill more awkward silences, and Livvie trying to do her part by asking more school-related questions. “How do you like AP History so far?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Mrs. DeLinde is pretty good.” Rhett’s polite response sounded distracted. Disconnected.
I knew the strange vibe was my fault, that I should do something to fix it, but I couldn’t seem to peel my tongue from the roof of my mouth to do anything besides take another bite. If only I could channel Livvie. She wouldn’t have made things awkward to begin with, but I sat there like a lump. Finally, Livvie pulled out her cell phone to check the time. “We better go. I need a couple of extra minutes with Miss Hebert.”
The ride back in Rhett’s car wasn’t quiet, exactly. I made a last-ditch effort to restore the balance. “So you’ve had a couple of weeks here now,” I said. “What do you think so far?”
“It’s like you said, you find what you’re looking for. Maybe,” he amended after a small pause. He sounded distant, and the weirdness continued.
Bran practically dove from the car when Rhett killed the engine. The rest of us climbed out, and Livvie shot me a look that communicated her annoyance before she turned to Rhett. “Thanks for driving,” she said. She turned to me. “You coming?”
I nodded. I wanted to say something else to Rhett, like, “Sorry I told you to move your hand. I didn’t mean it like that.” But knowing it would come out wrong, I only waved before I walked off with her.
Once we were out of earshot, she said, “I love you, but you’re an idiot.”
“I don’t even know what happened,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to be rude.”
“Maybe not, but you shut him down in front of witnesses. How is he supposed to take that?”
“I just...” I trailed off, trying to figure out what I’d been thinking. “He was still rubbing my back, and I didn’t think he knew, and people were staring, and I thought I’d point it out, and then it went wrong.”
“What are you going to do in sixth period?”
I sighed. “Hide in the design room. If I don’t talk, I can’t screw anything up.”
“That’s not how it works,” she said. Even though it was near the end of lunch, she pulled me onto a bench. “You’re sending mixed signals to him, and he’s getting confused. He wasn’t trying to be sketchy by rubbing your back like that, and you know I have excellent sketch-radar.” This was true. “You have to decide what you want because if you keep this up much longer, he’s going to walk away. You haven’t given him enough to work with.”
“It’s not only me,” I said. “He didn’t talk to me for a whole week.”
“Didyoutalk tohim?”
“No, but...you make this sound so serious,” I protested. “This isn’t high stakes. I’ve only known him a couple of weeks.”
“I’m trying to help you figure out if itishigh stakes,” she said. The bell rang to announce the passing period. “If you feel like your last year here is going to be better by letting Rhett slip away, then stay in the design room during theater arts. But if you think that Rhett might add a little color, then you need to figure out something different. Let’s go.”
She pulled me up, and I trailed along, thinking about what she said.Add a little colorreminded me of something my mom might say.
My mom used to call me her little thinker. I always asked her tons of questions about everything. I remember going with her once to a botanical garden and asking why there were so many different kinds of flowers there, why each flower was that color, why they were mixed with other flowers in some places and all one kind of flower in another spot. Finally, she sat me down on the grass and handed me a dandelion that would have soon fallen to the vigilant gardener.
“Chère,if you just love the flowers, they’ll be brighter than if you pull all their petals off. Sometimes that’s what asking too many questions does.” And then she’d promised me that if I still wanted to know when we got home, she would help me look up the answers I wanted. The rest of the afternoon, we wandered the gardens and focusing instead on how each blossom smelled and noticing the insects that hovered over them. Notwhythey did it, just that they did. It was a jewel of an afternoon.
Livvie headed off to English, and I kept on toward physics where I thought a lot about atomic structure and very little about Rhett. I was done thinking.
