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I’d hoped Callie would ask about Steven, so I could maybe ask her if things had been the same with her. But either she still didn’t feel like talking to me about my personal life, or she was just too distracted by her own. I felt pretty confident in continuing to go with ‘too distracted’ as an explanation.
What Callie did ask me—something that would never have happened before the past few weeks happened—was if I would come to a party with her.
“I’m surprised you’d think I would want to go to a party with the other people at our school,” I said. “I’m surprised you would want to go to a party with the other people at our school.”
Callie shrugged. “I don’t really. Well, Carlene is pretty all right these days, I know you don’t think much of her still but she’s been great to me when I needed someone to just accept me. Lucas is the one who wants to go, obviously, and it’d be fine if I could just spend time with him, but he’s bound to run off and boof it up with his idiot friends from other schools, and that just leaves me sulking in a corner if I don’t have my own people to spend time with.”
I could feel my face stre
tching into the same sort of incredulous stare I’d sometimes given other girls at our school who had tried to explain the sorts of things that mattered in their world. “Then… he should go, and you can stay home or go out somewhere else? I didn’t think you’d be willing to give up your time to something you don’t care about like this.”
“I’m not,” Callie said, “but Lucas thinks that’s a character flaw, or something. He says it’d be good for me to try doing things a bit differently… and the thing is, I’m not sure he’s wrong. We seem to have this thing going where each of us knows the other better than they know themselves.”
I shivered a bit at that. What if you had that sort of relationship with someone, and they still turned out to be bad for you? They’d be able to twist things to get you to do whatever they wanted.
Callie leaned back on her bed. It was so strange being in her room after so long hardly seeing her. We’d usually gone to my house before, but she hadn’t asked this time. Maybe she remembered how Mum was about men—and women who dated men—sometimes, or she wanted to stay on her own turf. “Steven will be there.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Did he put you up to asking me?”
There was a really? tilt to her eyebrows that made me feel warm all over for just a second, because it was sort of like a new version of what had existed between us before. The balance had definitely shifted forever—Callie was above me now instead of us both being on the same awkward level.
“I put myself up to it and it doesn’t mean anything in particular, I just feel like there is something going on there and maybe school is not the right place to explore it, you know?”
“What do you think of Steven anyway?” I asked, which probably confirmed to her that there was something going on, but she looked thoughtful, not smug.
“He’s all right. A bit cheeky, like he’ll flirt with me right in front of Lucas, but I think he just likes to mess around. He seems pretty calm and happy in himself most of the time.”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with that answer. How did it fit with the guy who’d pushed me around just because he saw me watching his friends from a distance? I wasn’t going to bring that up, though. Steven didn’t seem to be a danger to Callie at least, and making her worry about him would just cause problems between her and Lucas.
“I guess I’m interested in getting to know a bit more about him,” I admitted, which wasn’t giving away too much. It was as much because I wanted to assure myself he was safe as because of how I personally felt around him. “Where is this party supposed to be, anyway?”
I could tell from the way her face changed then I wasn’t going to like the answer. “Ashleigh’s house.”
I rolled my head as well as my eyes. “Can’t you get Aileen to come keep you company?”
“I already asked her too,” Callie said. “She said yes right away.”
Aileen would. “Why am I on the chopping block, then? One friend not enough of a buffer?”
“At Ashleigh’s place?” Callie mimed some dramatic gagging in case I wasn’t able to grasp her point. “She’s probably too cultured to hold regular parties. I can just see it now: I’ll be stuck talking to her parents’ business colleagues or something, because of course she’ll have to bring some serious adult contacts to this thing, you know? At least Aileen is a good buffer against that sort of thing, because I can’t imagine any serious business-type person in their right mind would have anything to do with her, but…”
“But, what?” Of course Callie suddenly had nothing to say all of a sudden. “Come on, Callie. What am I?”
“Nothing, you’re great.” Callie folded one leg up on her chair to scratch at her thigh. “You’re so suspicious these days, I don’t remember you being like this before. You’re just someone who is going to help me out at this party, right?”
Just? But I didn’t press her any further, and she changed the topic more smoothly than I remembered Callie being able to do usually.
I think we were both very aware that our friendship was never going to sit the same way it had before Callie found her way even to the fringes of the popular world. It wasn’t like we were rock-solid best friends before, but I’d never worried about it before. I had a feeling I would never be able to stop worrying now.
I ended up in the back of Callie’s hideous convertible, with Aileen on one side of me and Axel on the other. Callie and Lucas were our ‘parents’ in the front seat. They weren’t saying much to one another, but I had a feeling that was because they didn’t have much on their minds they could say in front of us. I was surprised Lucas wasn’t the one driving, but apparently he didn’t have a licence at the moment… and apparently, he didn’t want to talk about that either.
Well, I respected that. I’d left for the party from Callie’s place, because there was no way I wanted my mother knowing I was going to one. I even had to borrow something to wear from Callie, which didn’t sit quite right on my frame. I didn’t have enough hips or boobs to hold it where it was designed to be held. It frustrated me that I didn’t look quite right the one time someone might actually care, and it bugged me even more that I was caring about this at all.
Axel looked me up and down in an appraising sort of way that was all the more creepy for not seeming to have anything sexual about it. He asked me where I worked, and when I said I didn’t at the moment, he stopped looking me in the eye and just talked about himself, his fabulous business ideas or whatever. I had to wonder what this guy was doing hanging around Lucas, who sure as hell didn’t work. There was just no logic when it came to popular groups.
“That guy has the biggest pipe up his butt,” Aileen whispered to me, clinging to my arm as we went in like that encounter had completely shattered her confidence. Although just going into Ashleigh’s house, even as part of a group, was so intimidating it wasn’t like an actual person was needed to make it scary. The place sort of felt like one of those American TV soap sets, with the high ceilings and chandeliers and every doorway curved instead of having proper corners you could fit a proper door into.
“It’s not as nice as yours,” Callie whispered to Lucas. I traded grimaces with Aileen. Did she say things like that to turn him on?
