Cracked Up To Be

"Still pissed at me over what happened at practice, huh?"

"Go." I uncover my eyes and give her my best death glare, which I'm pretty sure is totally compromised by my total drunkenness. "Away."

She smiles. "Nope."

"I work really hard!" I struggle to sit up. "And you made a fool of me--"

"You made a fool of yourself by having a brain aneurysm in front of the entire squad," she interrupts. "You should've seen your face. You were going apeshit over the stupidest things, like, oh my God, we missed the beat. We'll get it. We always do."

"I wasn't having a brain aneur-an-any--" She laughs. I want to kill her. "Thing."

"And Chris is worried about you," she says.

I groan. "Shut up."

"He actually came to me; that's how worried he is. He's afraid to talk to you. He thinks you're fixing for a breakdown because you're, like, obsessed with perfection." She says this as breezily as someone relating the weather. And then: "So I told him about the panic attacks."

My heart stops. "You didn't."

She leans over me. Her face blots out the sky, and a strand of long blond hair hangs in front of my face, tickling my nose. I turn my head.

"It's the end of the year, Parker. Things are supposed to be winding down."

She makes me tired.

"Give Becky captaining duties until the year's over," she continues. "She's always wanted to do it and you can let her and say you did something nice. I've talked to the squad; they said if you do that, they'll want you back next year--"

This sobers me up completely for about five seconds.

"No. Are you out of your mind? Becky will do the loser cheer and we'll be a laughingstock--"

"It doesn't matter! Everyone hates you right now. You're an analretentive control-freak perfectionist and they need a break and so do you. And so do I--I can't do damage control for you anymore!"

"They only hate me until they give the best performance of their lives thanks to me and then they love me!"

She snorts.

"That's true and you know it," I mutter. Everything spins and I close my eyes. "I'm that good."

"Yeah, and the sooner you make a mistake and learn to live with it or let them make mistakes and learn to live with it, the better. Until that actually happens, I really think you're going to give yourself a stroke. You're not responsible for everything, Parker. You can't control the way things end up. Stop trying."

"Then it's my fault either way. Me, them. Everyone knows I do everything, so if they fuck up, it's my fault, and if I fuck up, it's my fault and--" I can barely think the words before I say them and start losing my thread. "The way it is, that's good. I'm a good person because it's the outcome that matters and I always do things that are right in the end--and that's how you get away with being a control-freak perfectionist, because in the end you're right... and there's no excuse for anything less. I am not going easy on them--"

"I'm getting Chris. You are so wasted it's unbelievable."

And she's right, but only about that. I'm right about everything else. A second later, I feel her brushing a strand of hair from my face. I push her hand away.

"Go, please..."

"Look, Parker, I'm telling you this as your best friend. You're freaking everyone out. If you don't step down, I'm going to do everything I can to get you off the squad for your own sake, and Chris has agreed to help."

It takes everything, but I push myself up from the ground and pitch forward. Jessie grabs me by the elbow and helps me regain my balance, but I don't want her help. I jerk my arm from her grip and fumble sideways, reach out, rest one hand against the side of the house and wait for the world to right itself. This is cheerleading. Serious business. My reputation's on the line and, and, and they know... they know I'm not--

"I can't believe you went behind my back."

"Parker--"

"Evan's cheating on you with Jenny Morse. They're fucking."

I slide down the side of the house until I'm sitting. Jessie looks like she's underwater, wavery, discombobulated, but I can still make out her expression: openmouthed, white-faced, hurt. I didn't want to tell her like this, but she deserves it. She shakes her head, totally shocked, and marches past me so she can break up with Evan, give him hell, ask him if it's true, whatever. I don't care.

"I'm only telling you this as your best friend," I call after her.

"Parker?"

The voice comes as a total surprise.

Maybe if I stay really, really still she'll go away.

"Parker, I know you're there. I can see your feet."

I heave a colossal sigh and sit upright.

"This is unexpected, Becky," I say. "What do you want?"

She marches up the aisle in an annoyingly self-assured way, a brown paper bag clutched in one hand, and sits beside me.

"Chris has been going crazy trying to talk to you, but he said you're avoiding him. So I said I'd talk to you because I know you won't avoid me. And we should probably talk, shouldn't we?"

"What about cheerleading practice?"

She shrugs. "Postponed."

"I never postponed for anything."

"This is important."

"So self-sacrificing," I sneer. "I bet it really turns Chris on. I bet he's thinking it won't be so bad being your boyfriend after all. Actually, I know he's thinking it. And so do you. That's the only reason you're here."

She inclines her head, like we're playing chess and I made the first move and it wasn't a bad one.

"I really wanted to start over with you after everything happened. I thought it was possible." She stares at the wooden cross mounted to the wall. "For about five minutes, I almost felt like there was this mutual respect thing going on..."

I laugh. "While you were wasting time feeling things, I was stealing your Beowulf essay and passing it off as my own."

She clenches her jaw. "At least after I saw Evan I didn't lose it."

"I'm disappointed. That's the best you can do?" "Yeah, it is." Becky nods. And then she nods again, like she really means it. "You know who feels sorry for you? Chris. That's pathetic."

"Yeah, it is pathetic that he's still in love with me."

She rolls her eyes.

"Do you feel sorry for me?"

It's one of those questions I ask before considering whether or not I really care about the answer. Who am I kidding? It's Becky. Of course I don't.

"You've made a choice and it's so obvious. I see it; I accept it," she says. "Even if no one else can. You want to rot and I want to let you."

If I was feeling generous, I'd congratulate her. The only person standing in the way of ultimate popularity--me--had stepped aside and she snapped up the position before anyone else even realized it was available. She probably watched me all year, waiting to see how my calculated fuckups could benefit her, and figured out my motivations in the process. That takes talent. She'll make a great sorority sister after she gets out of here.

"Who would've thought that you of all people would be smart enough to get me?"

"Yeah, weird, huh?" She hands me the bag. "Consider that my contribution."

I peer inside of it. "Becky, if I'm drunk in school again, I'm expelled. I still want to graduate."

"Do you really?" She stands and stretches. "I'd better go. Chris is waiting for me. Is there anything you want me to tell him?"

"Nothing I wouldn't tell him myself."

She heads back down the aisle and I stretch back out on the pew, holding the paper bag to my chest, the bottle of Jack heavy inside it. The door creaks as Becky opens it and I wait for the click, the noise that tells me it's closed and I'm alone again, but it doesn't come. And then, her voice:

"You know, it's not any harder on you than it was for the rest of us."

THIRTEEN

"Uh... what are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" I ask, settling into the seat beside Jake. The driver shifts gears, the bus shakes and our shoulders bump. "I'm sitting beside you."

"No, you're not. Your seat is at the front," he says. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm so flattered. "Nice try, though."

It's weird sitting in the middle of the bus, but it's my peace offering to Jake for flaking out on him since the kiss. By "flaking out" I mean I may or may not be avoiding him or pretending to be deaf when he talks to me, unless it's something to do with our art project, and then I pretend to be hearing delayed and wait, like, five minutes before responding, which I decided last night wasn't very nice of me.

"I'm not moving," I tell him.

"Evan--" He clears his throat. "Evan is Chris's best friend. He left before senior year because he had a breakdown or something. Chris told me."

"Very good, Jake," I say, nodding slowly. "And can you tell me why he had a nervous breakdown?"

"Nope."

"Well, if you can't tell me that, you can at least tell me what any of it has to do with me," I say.

"Chris said he'd tell me what everybody already knows," he says. There's an ungodly pause because we both know what's coming next. "You did try to kill yourself."

"It was an accident."

"Oh, right." He doesn't believe me. "That's why you meet with Grey, isn't it? And that's why no one leaves you alone and you're not popular anymore and Evan fits in there somehow. That's your big secret, right?"

"Congratulations, you figured it out. So how `bout them Mets?"

He blinks. "What?"