The Education of Hailey Kendrick - Eileen Cook [62]
“You can’t do that. You can’t sit back and wait for life to happen to you. You should have said something.” As the words came out of my mouth, an image of Drew flashed into my mind. I touched my lips lightly as if I expected to feel the burn of his mouth on mine.
“I couldn’t do that. Not to Tristan. What was I going to say, ‘Hey, guess what? I have a crush on your girlfriend.’ I always figured you guys would eventually break up and then after a decent amount of time I would step in. Who would have thought you guys would stay together for all of high school?”
The idea that Joel had been spending the past four years just waiting for something to happen made me sad.
“So when Kelsie and Tristan got together, you didn’t mind at all. It must have looked like your opportunity was finally here.”
“I swear I never planned it.” Joel raised his hand as if he were taking the Boy Scout pledge. Joel was a good guy. I suspected he was right. He never would have done anything to try to get a chance with me. He would have sat back and waited forever if he needed to. He wouldn’t have wanted to upset anyone.
“Hailey, I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. I know this must seem sudden to you, but it’s not. You’re right. We have been friends for years. Maybe now we can see if it might grow into something more.”
“You don’t love me,” I said, pulling my hands back, suddenly sure.
“How can you say that?”
“If you loved me, you would have taken the chance. You would have risked having everything go wrong because the slim chance that it might go right would have been enough to make it worth it. Love is risky.”
Joel leaned back on his heels. He was like one of those giant inflatable parade balloons that had sprung a leak. “You want to be with Tristan,” he said.
I sighed. “Not everything is a competition between the two of you. I thought I wanted to be with Tristan, but I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to be with Tristan because it’s easy.” I shrugged. “It might not even be up to me. It sounds like he and Kelsie are an item now.”
“I bet he would drop her if he knew you guys could work it out.”
“Then, that’s a shame. Kelsie deserves better than that.” I touched the side of Joel’s face. “You do too. You deserve someone who’s crazy about you.”
“But that’s not you,” he said, his eyes filling up.
“No, it’s not me.”
26
I stared at my copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. For some reason writing an essay for English on the effects of betrayal seemed a bit too close to home. I considered calling Kelsie, but I wasn’t sure how to start the conversation. How do you ask your best friend if she’s seeing your boyfriend?
Kelsie and I hadn’t become friends right away at Evesham. I’d thought she was too wild. Freshman year I was known for having color-coded file folders that matched my notebooks, and she was known for having the largest collection of lip gloss. She’d gotten in trouble at Halloween for wearing a cat costume to the masquerade party that would have made a stripper blush. She hung with the party crowd, and I hung with the nerds.
Kelsie and I had been assigned to do a project together for biology. She refused to touch the worm we were supposed to dissect, on ethical grounds. She was already a member of PETA and threatened that if our teacher made her touch “the innocent wildlife victim,” then she would arrange a protest march that would shut down the science wing. Our teacher decided that I would handle the dissection portion of the project and Kelsie would write up our results. I could tell ten minutes into the project that if I wanted to keep up my A average, I was going to have to write the paper too. I based this on the fact that Kelsie wasn’t interested in writing down anything I was doing with our worm. She was more interested in creating a chart that listed the calorie burn and fitness potential for a range of activities, so that she could get the maximum burn in the least amount of time.
“It’s genetics, you know. My grandmother was Italian, which makes me predisposed to plump up. It’s all the