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“Look,” I said, feeling my cheeks begin to burn. I couldn’t lie, of course. How could I lie, considering what I now knew about my nostrils? And okay, Lilly hadn’t figured it out yet, but it was only a matter of time. I mean, if Grandmère knew . . . “I really and truly value Kenny’s companionship,” I said, carefully. “But love. I mean, love. That is a very big thing. I’m not, I mean, I don’t . . .”
I dribbled off pathetically, acutely aware that everyone in the room, most especially Michael, was listening.
“I see,” Lilly said, narrowing her eyes. “Fear of commitment.”
“I do not fear commitment,” I insisted. “I just—”
But Lilly’s dark eyes were already shining in eager anticipation. She was getting ready to psychoanalyze me, one of her favorite hobbies, unfortunately.
“Let’s examine the situation, shall we?” she said. “I mean, here you’ve got this guy going around the hallways, screaming about how much he loves you, and you just stare at him like a rat caught in the path of the D train. What do you suppose that means?”
“Have you ever considered,” I demanded, “that maybe the reason I didn’t tell him I love him back is because I—”
I almost said it. Really. I did. I almost said that I don’t love Kenny.
But I couldn’t. Because if I’d said that, somehow it would have gotten back to Kenny, and that would be even worse than my breaking up with him. I couldn’t do it.
So all I said instead was, “Lilly, you know perfectly well I do not fear commitment. I mean, there are lots of boys I—”
“Oh, yeah?” Lilly seemed to be enjoying herself way more than usual. It was almost as if she was playing to an audience. Which, of course, she was. The audience of her brother and his girlfriend. “Name one.”
“One what?”
“Name a boy that you could see yourself committing to for all eternity.”
“What do you want, a list?” I asked her.
“A list would be nice,” Lilly said.
So I drew up the following list:
GUYS MIA THERMOPOLIS COULD SEE HERSELF COMMITTING TO FOR ALL ETERNITY
Wolverine of the X-men
That Gladiator guy
Will Smith
Tarzan from the Disney cartoon
The Beast from Beauty and the Beast
That hot soldier guy from Mulan
The guy Brendan Fraser played in The Mummy
Angel
Tom on Daria
Justin Baxendale
But this list turned out to be no good, because Lilly totally took it and analyzed it, and it works out that half the guys on it are actually cartoon characters; one is a vampire; and one is a mutant who can make spikes shoot out of his knuckles.
In fact, except for Will Smith and Justin Baxendale—the good-looking senior who just transferred from Trinity and who a lot of girls at Albert Einstein High School are already in love with—all the guys I listed are fictional creations. Apparently, the fact that I could list no guy I had a hope of actually getting together with—or who even lives in the third dimension—is indicative of something.
Not, of course, indicative of the fact that the guy I like was actually in the room at the time, sitting next to his new girlfriend, and so I couldn’t list him.
