The Mall - Megan McCafferty Page 0,53
lo mein noodles trembled.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Hair…” He was at a loss for all but the most basic words. “Ears…”
He unsteadily set the tray on the table and slid into the opposite side of the booth. Our booth. That had been one of my concessions. I’d negotiated him down from an hour-long dinner by agreeing to sit in our old spot. The stage was empty, though. No performances to distract us from ourselves.
“You’re not the same person from this morning!”
“I am absolutely the same person from this morning.” I rubbed my chopsticks together. “I’m the person I’ve always been.”
He grabbed my knapsack to get a better look at the buttons I’d affixed to the outside flap.
Silence = Death
Keep Your Laws Off My Body
This Is What a Feminist Looks Like
He tossed it back over to my side of the booth and sniffed in disgust.
“Is this what a feminist smells like? Bong water and butthole?”
He wasn’t wrong about the jacket’s stench. But I was not going to concede even the smallest point.
“As the future president of College Republicans at Columbia, how will you explain to your fellow conservatives why you’re familiar with either one of those scents?”
He sat back in the booth and gave me a long, hard look. The change in my appearance had definitely thrown him off his game. And he was studying me now, trying to make sense of what it all meant, urgently calculating how he could possibly retain the upper hand. I looked at my watch. Eight minutes down. Twenty-two minutes left in this date-like transaction to go. A length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. I wondered if I could persuade Troy into reenacting an episode of The Golden Girls until our time was up. I could be Dorothy and Blanche. He could be Sophia and Rose.
“Cassandra!”
“What?” I snapped. “And I told you to stop calling me that!”
“Casssssssie,” he overenunciated. “Did you ever hear from Simone Levy?”
Wow. An attempt at pleasant conversation. Well, fine.
“I finally got a letter from her last week,” I replied. “She wants to study art history and philosophy.”
“Her family must be loaded,” Troy said knowingly, “because that’s a double major designed for poverty.”
And as much as I hated to admit it—even to myself—I’d thought the same exact thing.
“Honestly,” Troy continued. “Can you think of a more pointless use of tuition? What a terrible ROI.”
Return on investment.
That’s how Troy determined the worthiness of his time, energy, and attention. He always wanted to get more back than he ever put in. I recognized in that moment that I had ended up being a very poor ROI and that was probably the only reason Troy wanted to get back together with me: to salvage what would otherwise be a colossal loss of his high school years.
I had felt the same way not too long ago.
“Not everyone has to go to college to be a Wall Street Master of the Universe,” I said. “I know someone who dropped out of the Wharton School of Business and has never been happier.”
Troy didn’t deserve to know about me and Sam Goody. But I didn’t want him not knowing about me and Sam Goody either. Alluding to Sam without mentioning him by name was my way of getting around this conundrum.
“That person,” Troy said with total conviction, “is an idiot.”
And that’s exactly why I didn’t want Troy to know I was maybe interested in someone new. What bothered me most about Troy’s comment? Knowing that eight weeks earlier, when I was still in full thrall of the plan, I would’ve absolutely agreed with him.
I checked the time. Fifteen minutes down. Fifteen to go.
“Can you stop looking at your watch?”
“There’s nothing in our contract that says I can’t look at my watch.”
“There’s nothing in our contract that says I can’t do the Lambada right on this table, but you won’t see me doing that throughout our meal.”
I choked at the thought of Troy gyrating his hips to the “forbidden dance.” At this point, he was as sexless to me as a Cabbage Patch Kid.
“Why don’t you just give me the doll and the documents, and we can just put an end to this awkwardness?”
I swirled a spring roll in a puddle of duck sauce and bit it in half. Troy steepled his fingers. It was one of his “power moves.”
“Is that the technique,” asked Troy with a snide smile, “you used on Slade?”
A few weeks ago, a comment like this from Troy of all people would