The Ex Games(27)
Author: Jennifer Echols

As if he knew what I was thinking, he startled me by pushing the big plate of community nachos in front of me. “No wonder you’re so skinny,” he said quietly. “Why aren’t you eating?”

“Hayden’s a vegetarian,” Liz called across the table, and suddenly it was community conversation.

“Oh yeah, I forgot.” Nick gave me a perplexed look, like he’d just found out I was a nun or a spy.

“How can you have gone to school with her for four years and not known that?” Liz challenged him. “Why do you think she’s the only person who brings her lunch on pepperoni pizza day at school?”

Davis could not get his brain around it. “Is it some Tennessee granola health club thing?”

“Just a granola health club thing,” I explained. “My family didn’t go vegetarian until right before we left Tennessee.” Luckily, I wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about being a vegetarian, because I knew it was good for me. If I’d been self-conscious, I might have begun to get uncomfortable right about then. With one short, unpainted fingernail, I traced a heart carved into the thick wooden table.

It was Gavin’s turn to look perplexed. “You’re from Tennessee?”

“Of course she’s from Tennessee,” Nick said. “Why do you think we always make fun of her accent?”

Gavin shrugged. “Because it’s there?”

Davis laughed and choked on his water. Liz pounded him on the back while Chloe commented, “Somebody’s being made fun of and you come running, no matter who or why, right?”

Gavin and Davis simultaneously said, “Right.”

“But I forgot you were a vegetarian,” Nick repeated to me. “I offered you nachos exactly like that in seventh grade, at this very table. You said you were a vegetarian and I nearly died of embarrassment for offering you meat.”

“And meat products,” Gavin couldn’t help chiming in.

But after Gavin’s comment, conversation stopped, and everyone stared at Nick. Nick? Dying of embarrassment?

He must have realized he’d blown his suave cover, because his face turned bright red.

Nick? Turning red?

“Excuse me,” I said, sliding off the bench. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.” I was a peeless goddess no longer. That was so seventh grade. Now I was in eleventh grade, and I peed. Though of course I didn’t need to at the moment. I needed to confer with my girlfriends.

“Me, too!” Chloe and Liz both said. The boys stood to let them out. Gavin and Davis grumbled about girls always having to go to the bathroom together. Nick never took his eyes off me. He knew my need to pee was a total put-on.

jib

jib

(jib) v. 1. to board around and over obstacles 2. such as Nick

Without waiting for the girls, I rushed between the booths and down a dark hall to the tiny women’s bathroom, which was wallpapered with women’s wipeouts. Big photographs cut out of the paper, pictures cut from magazines, and snapshots showed women on skis (and a few more recent shots of women on snowboards) taking hard spills and kicking up snow. Usually I found the bathroom highly amusing. Today, as soon as I opened the door, I stopped short. The walls were sending me a message.

But I didn’t stand there in awe for long, because Chloe burst through the door behind me. I hollered at her, “You’re trying to set me up with Nick again!”

“We are not,” Chloe insisted, moving over to let Liz through the door. “We thought about what you said last night. You’re right. We don’t want to throw away what we have with Gavin and Davis. So we thought we’d meet them here and reconcile. Without giving up those Poseur tickets.”

I folded my arms. “And you just happened to forget about that when you invited me, too? And Gavin and Davis just happened to forget they were meeting you when they invited Nick?”

Chloe tossed her blond hair and said, “Yes.”

“No,” Liz sighed, “we are trying to set you and Nick up.”

Chloe glared at Liz. “Remind me never to embezzle any funds with you. The least bit of pressure and you crack!”

“It’s not right to hide it from her.” Liz turned to me. “I definitely have misgivings about you getting together with Nick after that fire-crotch business in the lunchroom on Thursday.”

“Ah, update,” I said, turning a bit red myself. “He says I was wrong about that. I didn’t believe him at the time, but …” Something in Nick’s dreamy expression when he’d mentioned the seventh grade just now had made me wonder. Was it possible that he had defended me against Everett Walsh? It was all sort of medieval and chivalrous and romantic if I didn’t think too hard about it.

Liz nodded. “See, we may have been underestimating Nick. I feel responsible.” She leaned back against the wall. Her shoulders just covered an enlargement of a girl snowboarder in the midst of a spectacular face-plant. “Gavin and every other boy in school ribbing Nick about you … that all started in seventh grade. Remember that awful night at the Will Smith movie, right after you’d moved here?”

“Vaguely.” I rubbed my thumb across two chicks crashing into each other on skis as if I were getting bored with this convo.

“I remember,” Chloe called out. “I was trying to balance a couple of boyfriends at once. I had a lot to learn about cheating.”

Liz stared blankly at Chloe for a moment, then turned back to me.

“Will Smith movie,” I reminded her.

Liz shook her curls. “Right. I’ve always regretted telling you that Nick and Gavin had a bet about you. Nick had asked everyone not to tell you. Nobody wanted to go against what Nick said. But I couldn’t leave you out there alone, not knowing.” She shifted uncomfortably against the wall, like the snowboard in the picture was jabbing her between the shoulder blades. “I’ve been the butt of jokes before.”

I looked from Liz to Chloe and back to Liz. “Then why do you regret telling me?”

“I’m not sure anymore that he meant it as a joke,” Liz said.

“How else could he have meant it?” I shrieked. I looked to Chloe for help in talking Liz out of this insanity. But Chloe just poofed up her blond hair in the mirror, almost as if she agreed with Liz about this.

Liz shrugged. “I know Nick has a funny way of showing it, but I honestly think he’s got it bad for you. Chloe thinks so, too.”