all my efforts on going to sleep, and after what seemed like hours, sleep finally overtook me, giving me a dreamless eight hours before my alarm went off.
My wardrobe wasn’t difficult to pick out that day, since Karen wasn’t exactly the complicated type. I wore khaki pants with white sandals and a white form-fitting T-shirt. With my hair pulled back into a short ponytail, I slung my white backpack over my shoulder and made my way out the door. I noticed my mom’s car in the driveway, which meant she’d had a long night and must have been sleeping. When she didn’t bother opening the garage to pull her car in, I knew she’d gotten home much later than she’d want to let on.
I got into my own silver car and drove to school in silence. I had called David the night before to tell him not to talk to me today so that if Nate happened to walk by, he wouldn’t see me kissing some boy, and then trying to flirt with him. It had to seem like I was available, or this would never work. David hadn’t been happy with this idea, and I couldn’t blame him. Even I wasn’t happy with this, and I was the one making the rules.
Pulling into the busy school parking lot, I glanced down at the clock on my dashboard. I only had about five minutes before the bell rang, so I’d have to seek Nate out quickly. I made my way to the cafeteria and pulled an apple from my backpack. This, of course, was simply a prop to make it look like I had a legitimate excuse to be in the cafeteria. I spotted Nate easily enough. His light brown hair and rosy cheeks gave him away pretty quickly. His back was to me, and his shoulders were hunched over as if he, too, were exhausted.
Pulling on the hair in my ponytail to make sure it was firmly in place, I slid onto the bench next to Nate, causing him to jump slightly. When he looked up at me, I realized that he looked almost as pale as Karen had the day before. His cheeks were still bright red, but I suspected he could be frozen to death and his cheeks would remain naturally rosy. I wondered for a moment if perhaps Nate had gotten Karen sick, but thoughts like that didn’t get my job done, so I pushed them away to concentrate on what I was doing now.
“Are you Nate?” I asked sweetly, letting an innocent smile play on my lips. He paid absolutely no attention to my full lips as some boys did when I talked to them, and I was instantly reminded that this was going to be a difficult job.
“Yeah, I am… why?” It didn’t seem to be enough of a happy occurrence that a pretty girl was sitting with him; he was apparently the questioning type and needed a reason for this phenomenon.
“I’m a friend of Karen’s,” I said, my voice still oozing with honey. This got a reaction out of him, and he instantly straightened up and scooted closer to me, looking into my eyes intently.
“Is she all right?” he asked quickly, an urgency in his voice that I found touching. I was a bit puzzled by this reaction but responded to it with perfect cordiality.
“Oh, yes, she’s fine. She’s just feeling a bit under the weather.” I gave him a winning smile that was a mixture of sympathy for my supposed best friend and allure for him. He didn’t react to it in the slightest.
“Oh, good,” he breathed, obvious relief lining his voice.
“I, on the other hand,” I said as I scooted closer to him, “am all alone today. I was supposed to sit with Karen since it’s my first day at school and everything, but she’s sick, so I don’t know a single person here.” I batted my eyelashes at him a bit, and he cleared his throat and scooted away. At least I was making him nervous, that much was evident.
“Well, I’ll be here at break and lunch if you need someone to sit with, but if you’ll excuse me, I need to go to my first class. Can you find yours all right?” All of this was said with such a polite concern that I couldn’t lie to the boy, so I simply nodded my head and watched him walk away. I checked my watch once more and saw that there were only two minutes until the bell rang. Letting out a deep sigh, I threw the apple back into my backpack and stood up, only to have hands circle my waist from behind to rest lightly on my stomach. I turned my head with a shocked look of confusion to find David resting his chin on my shoulder.
“That didn’t seem to go well,” he remarked without any malice. There was only mild interest in his voice. He may not like my line of work, but at least he liked me enough to know when he shouldn’t tease me too much.
“Not at all,” I answered as I tilted my head to the side so that our cheeks were touching. I knew I shouldn’t be so close to David when I was in character to break someone up, but I knew Nate would be halfway to his first class right now anyway, so I didn’t see much point in enforcing that rule.
“Well,” David began, gearing up for what sounded like the beginnings of a pep talk, “after what you told me yesterday, I think your best bet for this one might just be to tell him the truth. I mean, you may be the most beautiful girl ever, but that boy’s got it bad. He’s not going to take any bait you put out there.” This all made sense, but the one thing David didn’t understand was that I couldn’t tell him the truth because Karen had told me not to.
“What if I’m not allowed to?” I asked, wondering what he might have to say to that little detail.
“I think Karen should be grateful to you for getting the job done, so I don’t think she should be able to put too many stipulations on exactly
“I guess that’s my only option,” I agreed quietly.
When the bell rang, David and I went our separate ways, fully aware that we wouldn’t be able to see each other for the rest of the day. After psychology I sought Nate out and found him just where he had said he’d be. I was afraid that after our interaction that morning, he would have found somewhere to hide from me until Karen came back to school the next day, so I was slightly shocked to see he’d kept his word. Then again, Nate just seemed to be that kind of guy-the kind who kept his word.
I slid into the spot next to him, yet again, and startled him, yet again. He looked up at me with what I thought looked like exasperation. “Hi,” he said, his eyes returning to the book in front of him. I looked down at the title written across the top of each page and almost laughed when I read
“English class,” he said, following my gaze to the source of my amusement. Those two words were all I needed to jump right in to my job.
“So I’ve been hanging out with Karen for a while now,” I started, gauging his reaction, which was absolutely unreadable. He didn’t even look up from his book to talk to me, so I pushed on. “She’s so much fun to hang out with.” I looked at him once more and got nothing. It was like talking to a brick wall. If I hadn’t seen him act so lively with Karen only the day before, I would have wondered what she saw in this guy. If he were like this with her, it would be like having a relationship with a teapot or a loaf of bread.
The only way to get this job done, apparently, would be to just drop my normal lines without waiting for his reactions and just see where to go from there. “So since we’ve been hanging out so much she’s really started thinking about how much she likes to just be one of the girls.” Still absolutely no reaction from Nate. “She’s kind of realized that she’d like some freedom in her life… you know… not being tied down and all?” I wasn’t really doing a good job at cushioning the blow, but it wasn’t my fault. This guy was so head over heels for Karen that he wouldn’t respond if a supermodel came and flirted with him. Not that I was comparing myself to a supermodel.
“So, I’m really sorry… I guess this is my fault for giving her a taste of single life, but she wants to break up with you,” I finally said, his lack of reaction making me bold enough to just come right out and say it. I suppose I thought maybe he wouldn’t react to that either and I’d have completed my job with no verbal backlash from the dumpee. I was wrong, of course, but not in the way I expected to be wrong.
“She doesn’t want to break up with me,” he said simply, his eyes still trained on the page in front of him. I wondered if he was actually reading the play or just keeping it there so that he wouldn’t have to look at me.
“Yes, she does,” I said, almost defensively, as if he were calling me a liar by not believing me.
“No, she doesn’t,” he countered. His voice was still neutral, like he was telling me that the capital of California was Sacramento. Finally, after a long silence of my confusion and his stubborn insistence, he looked up from the book. “Who are you really?” he asked, with a resigned curiosity.
“I told you, I’m Karen’s friend,” I repeated. He shook his head at this but kept his eyes trained on mine.
“I’ve known Karen her whole life. We’ve been friends since we could talk. She only has a small handful of friends and most of them are homeschooled.” My mouth hung open slightly from his completely out of the blue response. I hadn’t expected him to know her so well, but then again, I had to remind myself that I wasn’t dealing
