Rules for Being a Girl - Candace Bushnell Page 0,28
Marin. I’ve been thinking I need a change.”
He’s full of shit, clearly, but I smile anyway. I lean my head against the back of the seat rest. “You and me both.”
“So, um,” he says. “Where to?”
“Oh, crap!” I laugh and give him my address. “You can just drop me at the corner of Oak if you don’t want to deal with the roundabout. I can walk the rest of the way.”
“Now what kind of Uber driver would I be if I did that?” Gray asks with a grin. Then: “Hey, are you hungry?”
I literally just ate half a tray of spanakopita, but . . . “Are you?”
“I mean, I’m seventeen,” he says, grinning crookedly. “I’m literally always hungry.”
We stop at the Executive Diner on Route 4, following a stern-looking waitress to a booth by the window. I order a peanut butter milk shake while Gray gets a cheeseburger with onion rings and a side of chocolate chip pancakes. “I’ve never actually been in here at night before,” he says, looking around at the chipped Formica tables, the few schleppy middle-aged dudes posted up at the bar.
“Oh no?” I ask, wrinkling my nose at him over my milk shake. “Too busy wining and dining the ladies of Bridgewater Prep?”
“Or writing feminist op-eds,” he counters with a smile.
“Or getting kicked out of fancy schools for being a degenerate?”
I’m teasing, but Gray flinches a little. “Is that what I did?” he asks, raising his dark eyebrows across the table.
“Isn’t it?” I ask. “I mean, I heard . . .” I trail off. “Shit. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”
“Nah, you’re fine.” Gray smiles, dunking one of his onion rings in a ketchup/mayo/hot sauce concoction of his own making. “I don’t know how that rumor got started. I mean, I do, I like to throw parties, but that’s not what I got expelled for.”
“So what happened, then?” I ask, stirring my milk shake with a long metal spoon instead of looking at him. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me, obviously.”
“No, it’s cool.” He shrugs. “I was too dumb.”
My head snaps up. “You’re not dumb,” I say immediately.
Gray waves a hand. “I mean, sure, not dumb, but . . . I’ve got, like, ADHD and stuff, and was not meeting Hartley’s, uh, rigorous academic standards.”
I frown. “Don’t they have to accommodate you for that?” I ask. “It’s a learning disability, no?”
“I mean, sure,” Gray says. “But you also have to like . . . do your work every once in a while.”
“Ah,” I say, feeling my face relax into a smile. “Right. I can see how that would be part of the bargain.”
“Yeah. Anyway,” Gray continues, “people are going to think what they want to think about you, right? So I just kind of . . . let them think it. It’s a better story, in any case.”
“But don’t you ever want to set the record straight?” I dip my fork in his ketchupy sauce, tasting cautiously. Not bad.
Gray shrugs. “Sure, sometimes,” he says, “if it’s somebody whose opinion I give a shit about. But mostly I feel like: it’s only a few more months, right? What do I care?”
“I guess,” I say slowly. “Where are you headed next year, do you know?”
Gray groans, pretending to upend his plate of pancakes and slither onto the floor underneath the booth—only then he almost does knock over his Pepsi, grabbing the big plastic cup at the last second. His reflexes are impressive, I’ve got to give him that much.
“Uh-oh,” I say with a laugh. “Sorry. Touchy subject?”
Gray sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Both my moms are lawyers, right? Or actually, it’s worse—one of them is a lawyer, and the other one is a law professor. And both of them went to St. Lawrence, and both of them want me to go there and play lacrosse, because they donate a ton of money there every year, so it’s like the one place I’m guaranteed to get in even though I’m an idiot.”
“Stop saying that,” I tell him, kicking him under the table before I quite know I’m going to do it. “You’re not an idiot. What do you want to do?”
“Paint,” Gray deadpans, his face heartbreakingly serious for a moment before it busts wide open into a goofy grin. “No, I’m kidding. I kind of don’t want to go at all, honestly. I had to volunteer at this after-school program in Fall River for community service last year—which, yeah, I’m not saying that everything you