Between the Lines

- 11 -

Kendal

Braden disappears so quickly that I don’t even see where he went, and I’m still looking around at the crowds of people digging in lockers and talking to each other in the hallway trying to figure out how he did it when I feel arms wrapping around my waist from behind.

“Hey, Babe,” Kyle says in my ear, just before he plants a kiss in my hair.

I wriggle just loose enough to turn around and smile at him. “Hey. How was your last class?”

“I don’t know. I spent the whole time thinking about seeing you again.” He leans down to kiss me on the mouth this time, and it’s times like this that he manages to make the rest of the world fade away, and I just want to stay right here and feel like this.

But then he stops kissing me and starts talking again. “So, are you all ready to go? I thought I could follow you over to your house so you can drop off your car, and then take you home with me.”

Crap. Crap. Crap. “Uh, actually, I never had time to call into work.”

He grits his teeth and narrows his eyes, and immediately I wish I’d lied and told him… actually I don’t even know what I could have told him that would have worked better, and there’s this vague almost-voice in the back of my mind wondering what kind of person wishes she’d just lied to her boyfriend. “Well call them now, Kendal.”

I look up at the clock on the wall, but of course it only tells me what I already know. Calling in to work less than two hours before my shift starts will get me written up, and I’m supposed to be there in an hour.

I don’t like missing my job, anyway. While everyone else who has to work in high school is busy flipping burgers and coming home smelling like onions, I get to teach gymnastics to little kids who give me sticky high-fives and who get all concerned at the end of the class if I give all of them lollipops and don’t take one for myself. Getting written up seems like double punishment, anyway, because it’s already torture enough to have dinner with Kyle’s evil grandmother.

Triple punishment, since today’s Wednesday, and I promised little Juliet that I would help her master her hip circles tonight.

But I sigh and pull out my phone.

I’ve got the name of the gymnastics studio halfway typed on my search screen when the perfect lie hits me. I could just tell Kyle that there isn’t anyone to teach my class for me and I don’t have any choice but to go. I look up at him. “It’s loud out here, I’m going to go back into Mrs. Buchanan’s room and call where I can actually hear. I’ll be right back. Can you grab my coat out of my locker for me, and I’ll meet you back there in a minute?”

Mrs. Buchanan’s lights are off, but the door is open, so I slip inside and reach to push the door closed, but something stops it just a couple of inches before it hits the frame.

“Hey! Don’t hit me with it,” Kyle says, though he pushes it back hard enough that he moves me, too. He flips on the light switch, which I hadn’t intended to do, because there’s enough light from the windows, but the overhead lights reveal something I hadn’t noticed.

Mrs. Buchanan is sitting at her desk in the back corner of the room by the windows, doing something on her computer. Her eyes meet mine for a second, but she doesn’t say anything. I’m facing her, but Kyle has his back to her and doesn’t see her at all.

I raise my phone again.

“Want me to call them for you?” Kyle asks. “I can tell them you’re sick and you’ve lost your voice.”

Mrs. Buchanan’s eyebrow goes up above the line of her glasses, but still she doesn’t say a word.

No. No, I really don’t want Kyle to call my work for me. It’s this, I think… the following me when I didn’t want him to, and the thought of him calling my work for me like either it’s a big joke or something I can’t do for myself that finally pushes me over the edge.

“You know what, Kyle? I don’t want to call in to work to go have dinner with your grandmother. You know how I feel about her, and I don’t want to get written up at work. So will you please tell your parents thank you for the invitation, but that I have to work?”

He looks shocked that I would say something like that to him, and maybe rightfully so, because I don’t think I’ve ever actually refused a request from him before. But I’m serious, and I think he knows it, because his eyes flash black and he takes a step back from me.

“You know my mom already doesn’t really like you, Kendal. This isn’t going to help.”

That slices deep somewhere inside of me, because no, I have no idea why his mom wouldn’t like me. She’s always friendly and calls me “sweetheart”. We even went shopping together a couple of weeks ago. Why doesn’t she like me? The only person in his family who’s ever acted like they have a problem with me is his grandmother.

Hurt as I am by the comment, though, it doesn’t make me want to go over to his house right now, even a little bit. Mostly it makes me want to run away. So I just say, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all you’ve got, Kendal? For abandoning your boyfriend and skipping out on an old lady’s birthday party, is you’re sorry? You know, you’re a real bitch sometimes.”

Then he storms off out of the room and I know if I chased after him and called in to work it would fix everything, and I almost do it, but there’s this part of me that recognizes the fact that I’m perilously close to breaking down in tears, and I’d really prefer not to do something like that in the middle of the hallway. And then there’s this other part of me – it’s a tiny part, but surprisingly loud, and in my mind that part of me is shouting something really inappropriate at him as he walks away.

By the time I turn back around, Mrs. Buchanan is standing right there in front of me.

“Are you okay, Kendal?”

I swallow. “Depends on your definition of okay, I guess. But yeah, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

I am, but if I talk about it or think about it too much that stupid crying part of me is going to win, and so I just nod. “Thank you, though.”

“All right. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be here for a while tonight, and my room should be open early tomorrow, too, okay?”

And that – apart from the fact that she really does push me and stretch my writing – is the reason Mrs. Buchanan is once again my favorite teacher. Because she doesn’t push it. She doesn’t keep asking me questions and demand to know what’s going on, or suggest I go see the counselor or anything else. She just walks back to her desk and starts clicking around with the mouse, and she only peeks at me a few times out of the corner of her eye as I take a couple of minutes to pull myself together and hope that Kyle has had time to get in his car before I finally head to my locker.

I wonder if it’s bad that even as I feel shaky and weak and I wonder what in the world Kyle’s mom doesn’t like about me, and I have no idea how to fix what just happened, the main thing that I feel is a kind of airy relief. I don’t have to go see Kyle’s nightmare of a grandmother. After a few good hours at work, I can just go home and relax, and maybe figure out what I’m going to write next in this stupid story.

And I wonder if it’s weird that I’m seriously tempted to text Braden, before I even go to my locker. Not that I know what I would say. Hey, I just had a massive fight with my boyfriend, want to write a story? Yeah, no. But he did ask me to text him before I started writing, and since I’ll probably be thinking about what I’m going to write while I drive and work, maybe I really should text him now. Yeah, I probably should.

I slip my phone out of my pocket and bring up the contacts menu, and that’s when I remember. I gave him my number, but I told him to text me his, and there are no text messages on my phone right now.