Who's That Girl Read online

  “They’re raspberry.” Zach the Anarchist looked up from his notebook a second time, which startled me, partially because it was out of character and partially because his eyes were this crazy, ice-bright blue. With his blond hair, the effect was intensely Scandinavian. “Those are okay, right?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Um, yup. As far as I know strawberries are the only berries that can kill. Thanks.”

  Zach the Anarchist shrugged and broke his gaze to look very intently at his notebook. Today he was wearing a red T-shirt, only instead of that revolutionary guy’s face on it, there was Bart Simpson. The cookies, like most of his baking experiments, were very good.

  Tall Zach took the last three out and popped one into his mouth whole. “Whuf?” he said, when Tess gave him a reproachful look. “I’m carb-loading for my meet on Tuesday.”

  As the only one of the Acronymphomaniacs with any kind of athletic ability, Tall Zach routinely justified lunches of sour gummy worms and chocolate doughnuts with his cross-country running. Tess opened her mouth to retort but was cut off by a woman in bright-pink pants whacking her with the bathroom door.

  “Do you ever get the sense that no one notices us?” Tess said, as soon as the woman was out of earshot. “Or is it just that hanging out here sucks?”

  “Agree on both counts,” Tall Zach said. “But it’s convenient. Except if you’re Other Zach, I guess.”

  Zach the Anarchist lived all the way in downtown Philadelphia, although he did have a car.

  “I don’t mind,” he said to his notebook.

  I gave my iced tea a shake—too much ice, not enough tea—and set it down. “So is there a reason this was an emergency, or—”

  “Well, one, we just needed you here,” Tess said, chewing industriously, “because otherwise we’re lacking our token heterosexual female, and without it the Acronympho quadrangle of orientations is not fully complete.”

  “Yeah.” Tall Zach swallowed. “And I was getting sick of scoping out all the guys by myself.”

  He swept a glance around our corner of the café, but the only male person in the vicinity was the small kid with the immense laptop setup, who had big puffy headphones on over a tangle of brown hair and who blushed and looked away when Tall Zach smiled at him.

  “Two,” Tess went on, “because my parents are driving me absolutely batshit and I had to get out of the house.”

  “What was it this time?” I fished out a tea-flavored ice cube and crunched it.

  “Wister Prep sent home flyers about the Winter Formal thing, and my mom wanted to know if I had a young man I wanted to ask.” Tess fluttered her eyes briefly shut before snapping back to attention. “I told them I was taking Tall Zach.”

  “Ew, cooties.” Tall Zach made a face, then softened. “Tess, you should really just tell them.”

  He gave her shoulder a squeeze, but she ignored him.

  “Three, and finally,” she said briskly, “because Zach the Anarchist is being morose, and he needs help with his Latin homework, and because you, Nattie, are a Latin genius.”

  “Not really,” I said, although it was kind of true. All four Acronymphomaniacs had added Latin as a second language in eighth grade, but after Tess had discovered that declining nouns wasn’t going to help her with the SATs and Tall Zach had switched to Spanish 1b so he could go on the exchange to Mexico in ninth grade, only Zach the Anarchist and I were still taking it.

  “Whatever. You probably get all As. Dr. Frobisher loves you,” Tess said. “And Zach the Anarchist could really use your help.”

  “Not really,” Zach the Anarchist said. His cheeks were very pink.

  Tess rolled her eyes. “Why is everyone being so contradictory today? Look, Natalie—”

  “Ugh, don’t call me Natalie,” I interrupted. “It sounds so formal. Like I’m being desposisted in a court of law or something.”

  “Depositioned.” There was a teeny smile on Zach the Anarchist’s lips. “But nice try.”

  Now it was my turn to go pink. “Whatever. Go back to being morose about Mia.”

  Everything went silent. Well, as silent as it could be with the clanging of the espresso machine and the gurgling of the babies and the thumps of music leaking out of the laptop kid’s headphones. Mia, Zach the Anarchist’s girlfriend who he’d met at math camp, had broken up with him nearly two weeks ago, and we’d all sort of tacitly agreed not to mention it.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I mean, um, or don’t. She’s not even worth being morose over.” I’d only met her once, because she went to a public school in the city, closer to Zach’s house, but beyond her alleged abilities in math, she hadn’t really struck me as worthy of Zach the Anarchist. “She just had, like, big boobs.”

  “Nattie.” Tess gave me a billion-watt glare, but whatever she was going to say was blessedly cut off by Tall Zach leaping up in the direction of the counter.

  “Anyone want anything? Anyone? Anything?” He looked at each of us in turn, clearly trying to siphon away some of the awkward. None of us budged. “Okay. I’ll just . . . Bye!”

  I could still feel the nuclear heat of Tess’s stare, and even worse, the low-grade warmth of embarrassment coming from Zach the Anarchist. I had meant to make him feel better, but naturally, me being me, I had done it completely wrong and it backfired. Yes, Mia had been well-endowed, and yes, maybe I was a little mad that when Zach the Anarchist finally got a girlfriend it was someone with actual curves and the ability to wear red lipstick without looking like a clown after drinking fruit punch, but still. What on earth possessed me to say that? I wanted to melt.

  So I did what I always do in uncomfortable situations, which is pull out my phone and pretend to be invisible. Sebastian’s Pixstagram post was still at the top of my feed, and I held my phone to my chest and idly clicked on his profile, acting like I was busy typing something important as Tess slurped her cappuccino ominously. Besides the picture of the Wister Prep Donut, there was one of a Wawa sandwich next to a can of grape-flavored Hypr, one of the lit-up gingerbread houses of Boathouse Row along the Schuylkill, and a selfie in front of the big angel statue at 30th Street Station. Whatever Sebastian was doing these days, he was doing it in Philadelphia.

  “What are you looking at?” Tess pushed herself to my shoulder.

  “Nothing,” I said, but she’d already seen.

  “Are you Pixstagram-stalking Sebastian Delacroix?”

  “No,” I said, even though the selfie was very obviously him. “I was just browsing.”

  “Dude, you love him,” Tess said. “Love.”

  “Do not.”

  “Oh yeah? I seem to recall you following him to Meredith White’s end-of-school party back in June expressly so that you could make out with him.”

  There was a loud clatter.

  “’Scuse me.” Zach the Anarchist left his notebook at his seat and stepped around where Tess had crouched next to me. “Refill.”

  “Sure, sure,” Tess said distractedly, and waved him on.

  “We didn’t . . .” I started, then paused to scooch so Zach the Anarchist could get up, and then to scooch again so Tall Zach could sit back down. “Sebastian and I didn’t make out,” I said, as loud as I could without attracting attention.

  Tess squinted at me like I was going out of focus. “What do you mean? What were you doing all night?”

  “Just . . . stuff,” I said to Tess. “Who cares?”

  “Come on, dude!” Tess grinned at me. Well, she smiled, anyway. Her lips were firmly together, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t happy. Tess Kozlowski does not, as a rule, grin. Ever since Dr. Kozlowski, Tess’s dad, had used a huge, braces-wearing picture of a twelve-year-old Tess for a billboard to advertise his practice, Tess had stoutly refused to reveal her teeth when smiling, even postorthodontia. “Even I, a five point five on the Kinsey scale, will concede that Sebastian Delacroix is sex on two legs, if dudes are your thing. Right, Tall Zach?”

  “Huh?” Tall Zach had been ripping open his fourth sug
ar packet to pour into his strawberry frappé.

  “Sebastian Delacroix,” Tess said. “Right?”

  “Oof.” Tall Zach winced, then breathed out hard. “Yeah. Yeah, totally.”

  I picked at a corner of waxed paper in the cookie shoe box. “Even after the Talent Show Incident?”

  Tall Zach recoiled slightly. “Eurgh. I still can’t believe that happened.”

  “I can’t believe Nattie filmed it,” Tess said.

  My face got hot. “I didn’t know he was going to do . . . that. I just . . . I don’t know, wanted to have video of him.” It sounded a lot creepier when I said it out loud.

  “Anyway, that was like a million years ago.” She started industriously flicking through my phone. “Ooh, it looks like he’s still playing music, though. Does he have a band?”

  “Give me that.” I snatched it out of her hand.

  Tess pouted. “I’m just saying, if he’s in town, you should totally call him up.”

  “Nobody uses phones as phones, Tess,” I said.

  “It’s an expression. Text him up, or whatever.” She flounced back over to her seat in the booth. “Even if you almost kissed him, he’s still the hottest guy you’ve almost kissed.”

  It was then that I noticed Zach the Anarchist had left his mug on the table when he’d gotten up for a refill.

  “Well . . . yeah,” I lied. “Yeah.”

  At seventeen, I had almost kissed two people.

  The first one had actually been Zach the Anarchist, at the end of freshman year, which I didn’t even like remembering because of how dumb I’d been about the whole thing. Granted, we were ninth graders, so we were all kind of dumb, but I went above and beyond. That particular night, we were in the middle of an Acronympho marathon of Lifetime movies, which we watched not because they were good but because we could all at least agree that they were terrifically bad, and we had just finished one about a courageous group of suburban moms crusading to save their daughters from a predatory group of internet drug dealers in sinister-looking denim jackets when Tall Zach leaped up for the bathroom and Tess went to make more popcorn. This left Zach the Anarchist and me alone. Together. Kind of close. Because despite the huge basement TV room Zach had because his moms both work in high-powered executive positions, he and I had skipped the squishy comfort and good viewing angle of the leather couches and sat on the floor. Together. And since I’d spent that whole year getting this warm fluttery feeling when I was around him, like I didn’t just like boys, but one boy in particular, this felt—to my ninth-grade mind, anyway—very major.

  So the credits were rolling, and I was messing with one of the nubs in the carpet, because the carpet in the Wests’ basement is kind of nubbly in this way that’s fun to run your fingers over absent-mindedly. And Zach the Anarchist was doing the same thing, close to where I was sitting. And then our hands kind of brushed. And then I noticed that Zach was close enough for me to smell the root beer on his breath, which was kind of gross but also kind of exciting. Basically, everything would’ve gone fine, except that I completely and totally ruined it.

  “Can I kiss you, Nattie?”

  “Uh . . .”

  Five-second pause.

  “I don’t know?”

  I know. I know. If Tess hadn’t started yelling that the microwave was on fire (it wasn’t) I might have evaporated from my own stupidity. So ever since then, I got nervous when there was even the slightest chance that Zach and I would be alone together. Which, weirdly, was almost like still having a crush on him. Almost.

  Anyway, I recovered from that enough to almost-kiss a second boy a year later, and that boy was incredibly, impossibly, Sebastian Delacroix. Last June, I’d found myself standing alone at the end of Meredith White’s annual pool party, watching people fall into the pool, pretend to know how to break-dance, and try to make a drinking game out of badminton. To Meredith’s horror, some seniors had showed up with beer, which Tess had insisted all of us get some of—her to drink, and me and Zach the Anarchist to use as a prop in our defense of “Why don’t you have a beer, man?” The thing was, even with my friends there, I secretly hated parties, and I hated how much I hated them, because how dumb is it to wish you were home watching Law & Order with your mom instead of being a normal, not-weird teenager?

  Also, having taken a tiny exploratory sip, I discovered I did not like beer. It tasted like rotten straw.

  It was while trying to find a covert patch of weeds in which to dump my nasty straw-tasting beer that I ran into Sebastian Delacroix.

  “Oh,” I said. “Um, hey.”

  “Hello,” said Sebastian Delacroix.

  Sebastian Delacroix had one of those ridiculous names that could go to one of two extremes. A Sebastian is either the creepy kid who spent most of elementary school eating paste, or a guy who owns his weird name and makes it mysterious and sexy. Sebastian Delacroix was definitely the latter. He was tall, tan, and was rumored to have a tattoo. He played guitar and wore blazers that showed off his broad shoulders. He wrote poetry in a notebook he kept in his back pocket. He was funny.

  So, obviously, everyone was in love with him. Myself included.

  At the time of Meredith’s party, Sebastian was no longer the hottest guy in school because he was no longer, technically speaking, a guy in our school. He had graduated a year ago and headed off to NYU to start a degree in photography, but really, that only served to amplify his natural attractiveness into some kind of mythical hotness.

  “Natalie, right?” he said. “Weren’t we in French together?”

  We were, but only because I was taking two languages at once and because Sebastian was not très bien at languages and had had to add French 3 his senior year in order to graduate. Still, I was shocked he remembered. Of course, I remembered, because I had spent every other day that year getting up at six to blow-dry and straighten my hair just so it would look not-weird for the forty-five minutes Sebastian might catch it in his peripheral vision.

  “Uh, oui?” I cringed so hard I almost pulled a muscle. Sebastian didn’t seem to notice.

  “Not a drinker?”

  I realized I was still, stupidly, holding my Solo cup over the fence.

  “Not really,” I said, because there was no way to deny that I was not about to drink the beer that was already half splattered onto what I now realized were not weeds, but Mr. or Mrs. White’s hostas. “I’m, uh . . . just trying to get the plants drunk.”

  Sebastian stared at me for a minute and then chuckled. In my shock, I accidentally emptied the cup onto my feet.

  “Shoot,” I said. My mind was still reeling: Is he laughing with me, or at me? I felt glowy, terrified, and sticky-footed all at once.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. My plastic Target flip-flops were the only part of my outfit that was actually mine—well, the flip-flops and my underwear with the ducklings on it. I’d had to borrow a green halter dress (and some red lipstick) from Tess because apparently none of my clothes were suited to a party situation.

  “How’s, uh, New York?” I said, just as Sebastian said, “You look good, Natalie.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Sebastian bit his lip. “New York is good, I guess. New. Yorky. My new band’s recording some stuff for an EP, so I actually have to get back tonight.”

  “Ah,” I said, not sure how to react and not exactly sure what an EP was. Not that bands weren’t cool, just that I wasn’t cool enough to know about them. My favorite record happened to be Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which was strummy and sad and thoughtful and was last on the charts when my mom was two years old. I was, to say the least, behind the times.

  “Yeah,” Sebastian said. “The Young Lungs. It’s me and a couple of guys from school, but I write most of the songs.”

  Unable to meet his eyes because of my congenital awkwardness, I took an instinctive look away from him and back at the party. People were screaming in the water, a girl in the corner was crying incomprehensibly into her cell
phone, and the music was loud enough to rattle your brain in your skull. Nearer to the backyard gate, Meredith White was looking at me with laser-heated anger. Well, not me; me and Sebastian. Meredith wasn’t an Acronympho, but she did do the literary magazine, which was only a few degrees separate. She was one of those girls who wore turtlenecks and worried too much about homework.

  Something in the way she looked at us made me feel a few shades less weird. If I was making Meredith jealous, I must be doing something not-wrong. I flicked my head around and smiled.

  “So I’m gonna go,” Sebastian was saying. “Unless . . . you want a ride?”

  I considered for all of two seconds. Tess would understand, Tall Zach was out of town, and I wasn’t sure if Zach the Anarchist was even still here.

  “Yeah.”

  Sebastian’s car was a beat-up Crown Vic sedan with a broken radio and crummy upholstery, the bottom littered with cans of Hypr energy drink and actual CD cases, like this was the past or something, all from bands I’d never heard of. He blasted some singer-songwriter he liked and told me about his plans for crafting the Young Lungs’ sound and how he was considering dropping out of NYU altogether just to focus on music because school was a waste of time. I mostly nodded, because saying something out loud would increase my chance of sounding dumb by at least 50 percent.

  After about half an hour, I realized we weren’t driving anywhere in particular.

  “So, Natalie,” Sebastian said, drumming his fingers on the wheel. “That’s a beautiful name, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t pick it or anything, but thanks.” Make that 100 percent. I balled up the hem of Tess’s dress in my fist.

  “Well.” Sebastian’s face was half in shadow, so I couldn’t see his reaction. “Do I take you home?”

  “Uh,” I said, “I probably shouldn’t stay out too late. My parents will think I’ve been murdered.”

  But Sebastian just chuckled this time and then pulled the car to a stop.

  “Hah,” he said. “You’re great to talk to, Natalie.”

  I knew for a fact that the only reason I’d been good to talk to was that I had successfully managed to say as little as possible, but I at least had the good sense not to say that out loud. So I just nodded. Mysteriously.