Then Everything Happens at Once, page 2
This is why I can never hold on to the feeling of being in my body, grounded in a moment. There’s always a thing that knocks me right back to awkwardness.
At the car, I resume my leaning against the stool, going back to my phone, to the DM from a mystery guy named Alex.
[Baylee] You’re welcome. 😊 Did you come up with that pun, too? Or was that your bosses? 🤔
[Alex] 😂 That was all me. 😎 I know it’s a little cheese, but what else could I do with Oreo?
[Baylee] True. Kind of random, but is there a dress code at Bookworm Café?
[Alex] Just that whatever we wear has to be black, that way the green vest pops.
[Baylee] I have always wanted to work there.
[Alex] Do you have experience?
[Baylee] Not really, but my mother owns a coffee place. A drive-thru by the highway.
[Alex] Ahhhh, so coffee is in your blood then. But aren’t u breaking ur mom’s ❤ fraternizing with the enemy?
[Baylee] I would be but black is my color whereas burgundy is not.
[Alex] Is burgundy anyone’s color? 🤒
[Baylee] 🤮
“Okay, can you show me the next part again?” Freddie asks.
“Shit—your phone’s locked again.”
“What are you doing?” Freddie calls. Then his head pops out from under the car, and it almost touches my ankle. “You’re supposed to be assisting.”
“Supervising,” I say.
“Why would I need a supervisor? I need someone to assist.”
“I felt I deserved a promotion. Anyway, as your assisting supervisor,” I say, “I have to ask what would happen if we don’t put everything back properly and your transmission falls out when you drive?”
“It won’t. But let’s say it does,” he says. “We could just blame it on my dad.”
My face twists in a sad pout, and we lock eyes together. “Yeah, we totally could. And if I break a nail, it’ll be his fault, too.”
Six months ago, Freddie’s father up and left to move in with the woman he was seeing on the side—we found out one night when we overheard his mother on the phone. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t.
Except for Lara and my journal, but it’s assumed that any new piece of information I’m given will be shared with them.
“I’m going to fix this car myself and he can just keep paying for the parts,” Freddie says. “Sure, it’s all his fault that I’m not driving my car yet, even though I’ve had my G2 license for over a month, but it’s just a minor bummer. Isn’t it pretty zen here now that he’s gone?”
“It’s like, next-level zen,” I say.
There was definitely always tension between him and his dad, but they also spent a lot of time doing stuff on weekends together. This isn’t the first car Freddie’s given a makeover to.
“Is he visiting this weekend?” I ask.
Freddie shrugs. His dad comes for a few hours every other weekend, mostly to visit Freddie’s two-year-old sister. Freddie’s got an open invitation to spend weekends at his dad’s new house, an hour away, but he’s never been.
“Do you think Shaya can tell he’s gone?”
“Doubt it. For a whole year before he left, he was supposedly ‘working late,’ so it’s not like he was around that much. She’s just happy to be with my mom all the time,” Freddie says. Then he rolls out from under the car. “Tonight would’ve been a lot more fun if the car was already running, though. We could’ve been taking a road trip right now.”
“Yes! Where would we have gone?”
“Well, there’s this food truck park like, thirty minutes north of here.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, fifteen food trucks in a row,” he says. “Mexican. Caribbean. Greek food. Fried mac and cheese, chicken and waffles.”
That literally sounds like a dream, but as if I’d go stuff my face next to Freddie. Anytime we eat around each other, I try to have the appetite of a tiny little girl, and I save my real eating for home.
“What about going to Port Perry?” I say. “There are all these cute little shops, and it’s by the water.”
“Let me look it up,” he says.
Freddie and I end up on the couch, and I look over as he scrolls through his phone.
Say he leaned over and kissed me right now. Is this what it would be like to be his girlfriend? Do I want to be his girlfriend? All I know is I want what’s happening right now, plus I want to see him naked. I want whatever that is.
“Check this bookshop out,” he says. “I bet they have old screenwriting books there.”
“Probably,” I say. “How’s your script coming, anyway?”
He shrugs and plays me the meme of some sports guy sitting at a table for a press conference, and in a thick Greek accent, the guy goes, “Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit.”
I laugh. “Oh, I’m sorry. Can I read it?”
“No way.”
I might not be allowed to read his script, but I treat the fact that I know about it as sacred. “Why is it a secret, though?”
“It’s like this thing I really want to be good at, except I don’t really know what I’m doing,” he says. “It makes me feel like some kind of loser who thinks he’s something he’s not, you know?”
Yes, I do know—not about writing, but definitely about other things. “Why would you feel that way?” I ask.
He shrugs and keeps scrolling while I watch the screen of his phone. Finally, he goes, “When I was like, eleven, I wrote a poem and my dad laughed.”
“What a turd!”
“I mean, the poem was really bad, and I hate poetry, so I don’t know why I decided to write this rhyming paragraph of shit, but still. You don’t laugh when your kid shows you something they wrote, right?”
“Nope. That’s next-level mean.” I think for a minute. Then I say, “Maybe you should take a screenwriting class and make your dad pay for it.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, we should totally go to Port Perry. Then you can sit by the water and write your script, and I’ll bring my journal so I can write down super-deep thoughts while the breeze flows through my hair.”
Deep thoughts about how I can’t handle how much I want him to touch my ankle again.
“Too bad it’s February, or else I’d borrow my mom’s car and we could go tomorrow,” he says.
“Well, maybe we could still go?” Anticipation builds inside me, and it becomes full-on butterflies as Freddie turns his head to look at me. “I mean, it might be pretty in the winter, too.”
He goes to answer, but suddenly the garage door starts to rise.
Lara stands a few feet behind Trey, and her arms are folded, a clear indicator that they’ve had yet another fight.
Freddie climbs to his feet and heads over to bump fists with Trey, and I deflate internally as the butterflies die.
Two
I avoid making eye contact with Lara for the sixty seconds it takes to reset my expectations and shove down the disappointment of having been robbed of my private Freddie moment. I remind myself that nothing would’ve happened anyway, that I would’ve gone home in a few hours, totally turned on and next-level frustrated. The zen layer is safely restored.
Lara is stone-faced, but when we look at each other, she kind of shrugs like, Well, this sucks.
Trey is that guy who had a pretty face as a young boy and probably hated how it made people assume he’d be sweet and nonthreatening, so he went the other way, bulking up, permanently squaring his shoulders, and always maintaining a serious, smoldering expression to prevent the dimpled, twinkly-eyed smile from poking through too often. He used to laugh along with the others when I’d get asked out every morning back in the day, but this is not something I hold against him. When we all started hanging out together, it’s like all the stuff that happened before then got filed away somewhere and we moved on. Besides, if I were to avoid associating with anyone who made fun of me and/or laughed at my expense before we got to high school, I’d probably be an awkward loner.
Lara came later. First day of Grade Nine, having just moved to Castlehill, our Toronto suburb. If I had to describe her in two words, I’d pick fierce and sophisticated. She’s Sri Lankan, as tall as me—five nine or so—with thick, silky dark hair that cascades down her back. She’s also got near perfectly shaped eyebrows that accent her hot-girl resting bitch face. Near perfect because the perfect eyebrows belong to me. Another thing about Lara is that where Rianne has to shop very carefully for accessories that complement her style, and I basically just have one store I can shop at so I make do with what’s there, Lara looks more put-together than all the other girls our age because every article of clothing in just about every store is made for her. Also, her parents have money.
Right now, she’s wearing skintight black jeans ripped at the knees, a drop-shoulder oversized cream sweater, and a tan trench coat.
“It’s about time,” Freddie tells Trey. “This is getting old, bro. You could at least text me to let me know you’re going MIA.”
“Why didn’t you ask Rav to come help until I got here?” Trey and his white teeth say.
“Because Baylee is a lot more help than Rav.”
“True, true.” Trey laughs, then unzips his jacket and heads over to the car. “Men, let’s get to work! Girls, you can have a seat and watch.”
“Oh my god—so fun!” Lara says, rolling her eyes so hard I worry they might not fall back into place.
“Most fun I’ll have had all night!” Trey says, mimicking the same overly enthused tone.
“How sexist can you be?” Lara says, and he pretends to put his fingers in his ears. “And no one wants to watch you guys work on that piece-of-shit car.”
“Come on,” Freddie says. “Her name might be the Shitbox, but she is not a piece of shit.”
“Well, it’s broken and it’s not a very nice-looking car,” Lara says with a shrug. Freddie fixes her with a glare. “What? It’s true.”
“You’re so nice, Lara,” Freddie says. “Your honesty is so refreshing.”
Trey laughs, and I cover my face with my hands.
Lara tips her head toward the door as she makes eye contact with me. I climb to my feet in the most graceful way I can manage.
“Time to go,” I say to the room, then to Freddie, “Okay, well, bye.”
“Port Perry,” he says, with a thumbs-up, and I try not to smile too wide.
“Port Perry what?” Trey asks.
“Nothing,” Freddie says.
Trey and Freddie become completely car focused as Lara and I slip out into the night. I punch in the garage code we all know, closing the door behind us. Our steps leave a trail of crunching sounds behind us as we make our way down Freddie’s driveway, which is lined in a thin layer of icy snow.
I expect her to unload about Trey and what a piece of crap he is, but instead, she says, “I’m sorry about tonight. I really am.”
Still, I’m not letting her off the hook that easily. “You know what? I’ve gotten used to this.”
Lara groans. “I’m sorry.”
“I mean, I thought we were going to have a stellar evening—you, me, my mom, and Rebecca, watching Dirty Dancing or Mean Girls in our pajamas. But it’s fine. You know how much experience I have getting excited about things despite knowing they’ll never happen. I’ve trained my whole life.”
She lets out an exaggerated sigh.
My training has largely consisted of hundreds of elaborate scenarios I’ve created about myself and Freddie, mostly, but also the other seventy-five crushes I’ve had since Grade Six or Seven. My pastimes include manicures, reading, writing in my journal, and whipping myself up into a sparkly ball of excitement over stories that are totally imaginary.
Lara is the one person who knows this, who can watch me from her seat in English class and tell that I’m daydreaming about something that’s most definitely boosting my heart rate.
We stroll down Freddie’s street, soon passing the walkway that would lead to my house. I guess we’re going to take the long way so we can talk.
“I know I’ve been kind of flaky, but Baylee—sometimes it’s really hard to talk to you about what I’m going through with Trey because . . .”
“Because what?”
“Can I be totally honest?”
I shrug.
“Well, you’re always so black and white about everything. You’re kind of harsh. It just makes me feel like you don’t understand where I’m coming from because . . . well, you can’t relate.”
Ugh.
I want to be the kind of friend who can have real discussions—discussions about uncomfortable things—and stay super collected and even-tempered. I think Lara is like that, and maybe I’m trying to be something I’m not. Because I just want to call her a bitch right now for saying what she said.
“Are you mad at me?” she asks. “You said I could be honest.”
“I’ll be honest, too, then.” I glance over to gauge her reaction, and she looks all ready and willing to hear what I have to say. “It’s pretty clear to me. I’m sitting here, watching it all go down, the same thing happening over and over. It’s like you want the drama and the games. Why else are you still hanging around Trey? You two never get along for more than twenty minutes before it falls apart.”
The truth is, I find it kind of exciting, being part of the Trey and Lara drama—the arguments, the tears, the storming off in the night, Freddie and I in frequent communication as we each handle our respective best friend through it all. It’s literally the closest I get to experiencing anything real. The sweet agony of romance woes—I want that so bad. Even the woes part, although I’ve observed enough to know how to avoid making the same mistakes, not to end up in the same shitty situations everyone around me gets into. You see it all so clearly when you’re on the sidelines, and I’ve been taking mental notes.
“Okay,” she says. “Maybe that’s how it looks from the outside, but trust me, no one goes into it looking for drama.”
“How are you not mad at me for what I said?” I ask.
“You weren’t mad at me for what I said.”
Except I was—I am—I just spend a lot of time acting differently on the outside from what I feel on the inside.
“How come you’re so calm and mature when you and I talk, but when it’s Trey, you’re just . . . ?”
“I’m what?”
Dramatic, petty, annoying. “Different.”
“Trey and I are definitely not good for each other,” she says. “I don’t think he likes me, and I think I’ve been pretending I don’t see it.”
“Lara—do you actually like him? If your answer is yes, then please elaborate by telling me what you actually like about him,” I say. Lara thinks it over, and when she goes to open her mouth, I hold up a finger at her. “Nothing about his looks.”
“He has a really sexy voice—”
“Vocal cords are body tissues!”
“I know! I’m just kidding,” she says, but I’m not convinced. She shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I was hoping there would be more in there. Like I’d be the first girl to get to know the real Trey.”
“He used to eat worms when we were seven.”
“Stop!” Lara says, then she frowns. “Well, what do you like about Freddie?”
“What does it matter? He’s not my boyfriend.”
“But you want him to be.”
I shrug. “I’m not sure.”
“You must,” Lara says, stopping to meet my gaze. “Or else what would be the point of having such a big crush on him?”
“I guess there is no point.”
Freddie is the ultimate thing I get excited about, despite knowing it’ll never happen. That fact makes my insides hurt. No—more like burn with rage. Freddie and all the boys I’ve crushed on, they only date certain types of girls. Types that aren’t me. The fat-positive girls I follow on Instagram and TikTok tell me there are people out there who are into girls like me, but out there is clearly not here. Half of Grade Eleven is already over, I’m going to be seventeen in less than two weeks, and I’m still just sitting here yearning. Yearning for very specific physical things to happen, and I want them to happen with Freddie.
Sometimes I wonder if Lara is acting on the outside as much as I am. “Maybe you think you like Trey but really, it’s just that you want to mess around with him?”
Her eyes get wide. “No! I am not that kind of girl.”
I am that kind of girl, I guess. Or I would be if I could. I’m like, the purest, virginal slutty girl there is.
“Okay, but would you enjoy his company enough to just be friends with him?”
“We used to be friends, before we started dating.”
“No, you weren’t. We just all hang out together—you, me, Freddie, Trey, Rav, Rianne, sometimes Matt and Steph—but we are not all actually friends. I would never call Rav my friend and hang out with him alone. He’s just there. Same goes for Trey. He’s really hot, but he’s kind of blah as a person.”
“He really is hot,” she says with a heavy sigh. “Maybe we need new friends.”
We resume walking, and the cold is threatening to make its way up my back. I am so regretting letting my legs agree to follow her on the long way home to my house.
“Anyway, the Trey stupidity is over. This is the last breakup.”
“You break up every couple weeks.”
“This one is real—I swear on my Jimmy J Smoky Glam Shadow Palette,” she says, and my mouth forms into an O. “I know! This isn’t a joke. You’re my best friend and I want to apologize for deserting you over a guy. I just get caught up in the moment, and I don’t think clearly. That’s not a good excuse, though.”
“Okay, but what makes this time different? He’s still the same sexy sack of meat.”
“The difference is me. I am not weak. I want to be like you,” she says.
“What do you mean? What I am like?”
“You’re comfortable by yourself. You can get in your own head, sure, but you’re just you. You don’t need someone else—you just said you’re not even waiting around for Freddie to be your boyfriend. You’re doing your own thing, and that’s enough for you. I want to be like that.”
