Love, and Other Geometric Relationships
For all her anti-establishment, damn the man, save the empire views and her rebel, rebel posturing, sometimes Grace felt like the biggest poser on the face of the planet. Sure, she wore it well. She was Grace. Polk. Her name was said in hushed whispers in the girl's locker room, followed by some story that had her hitting on a cheerleader or being caught making out with another girl behind the equipment locker. She was the black sheep of Arcadia High, and she loved every minute of it. Well, she used to anyway. Lately, she'd been feeling less and less like Grace Polk and more and more like some Frankenstein's Monster stitched together from cast away bits of Girardi. And it was pissing her off.
She wasn't stupid; in fact she considered herself far more self-aware than the average 16-year-old girl. She, after all, didn't get the majority of her personality and opinions from the pages of Seventeen magazine. It was just that she had a bad habit of taking on little bits of other people's personalities here and there. Her penchant for leather jackets had come from her first glorious, secret viewing of Joan Jett's video for "I Love Rock and Roll." She was 11 at the time, and Joan Jett had been a wake up call from a world of Saturday dresses and politeness that was beginning to take its toll. She had gotten her slouch from Rove, because once puberty hit and he shot up a few inches he had felt so bad for her "perpetual state of shortness" that he had made the conscious effort to keep himself at her level. It was the only real thing of Rove's that she had ever thought she could make her own, so she adopted it. Adam had complained that it completely defeated the purpose of his slouch, but she had liked the way he smiled at her when he said it, so the slouch had stayed.
There were other, smaller things here and there. She had once gone an entire week without speaking after she had done a project on Tibetan monks, and there was her whole vegetarian stage after she read Fast Food Nation. She was well aware of this. It didn't bother her. These things had started as imitations, but she had made them her own. They had become part of the entire Grace Polk persona. They joined with the countless other things she had picked up as initial rebellions, like her last name and her refusal to wash her hair on a regular basis. That was cool with her. It was these new things that bugged her.
Like the shirts, and the scarves, and the hair washing with shampoo that smelled like apples. She didn't like it, and most of all, she didn't understand it. She didn't even like Girardi! She didn't understand why just because Joan and Rove had some big, unrequited love going on that she had to be in the middle of it. But she was. She was in the middle because Rove would mention Joan and get moon eyed and stupid looking, and Joan would try to be casual while she played with one of her damn, ever present scarves and asked if Adam talked about her. Of course he did. Who wouldn't?
She wasn't a lesbian. Sure, she didn't deny all those locker room rumors but only because it made the others girls scared of her, and the more scared they were the less likely they were to try and be become best friends for ever. She liked that situation. She hung out with Rove, she liked him, he was good people. She didn't need anything else. She certainly didn't need Joan and her scarves and her stupid, twisty skirts that always brushed against Grace's legs in AP Chem. But here she was. And here Grace was, wearing scarves and washing her hair with shampoo that smelled nice. It would be easy, so easy, to write it off as another example of her bad habit. That she did these things because Joan did these things, and like it or not, Joan had become one of Grace's people. But that wasn't it.
The fact of the matter was, somewhere between that first day in AP Chem and now, Grace had developed an all out thing for Joan Girardi. And it fucking sucked.
It fucking sucked so much that Grace was in a constant state of aggravation. Even more so than usual. She wasn't even bothering to piss people off anymore. Well, not the masses, anyway. She was making a very strong effort to piss one skirt wearing, scarf obsessed girl off. She was taking Joan's scarves straight from her room. Joan was excited that Grace wanted to share clothes. She was mocking Joan more than usual. Joan laughed and giggled in that way that made her nose scrunch up. Hell, she was making out with Joan's brother on a regular basis. Joan just said "ew" and asked her to never, ever share any details. Grace was going absolutely batshit insane.
She had spent sixteen perfectly nice years just being Grace Polk. Sure, other people thought she was some angry, complicated lesbian but in all truth she was a rather simple person. She read, she did her part to turn the happy town of Arcadia and its values upside down, she did everything in her power to make her father disown her, and she hung out with Rove. That was how she liked things. But suddenly, here she was in the midst of some damn teen soap opera. She liked a girl. A girl who was for all intents and purposes her best friend. That girl liked her other best friend, who was dating some girl who the girl she liked hated. She was getting a headache just trying to keep the damn thing straight. On top of all that, she was making out with the brother of the very girl she liked. She had gotten herself involved in some giant love pentagon. Well, if she was being honest it was a hexagon, because Luke was technically dating Glynis, and kissing her little bird lips in public, and it was sickening. Shit. Now she was the other woman in addition to all of the other teen drama. This sucked. She hated it. But, in true Grace fashion, that just meant she had to have even more of it.
So, she went with it. She spent countless hours on the phone with Joan, listening to her trash Iris in ways so creative it was almost impressive and analyzing every single move Rove made. She'd even started sleeping over. She was having sleepovers. With nail polish and pajamas and cookies and staying up all night talking. The damn things were even becoming a habit, and it was absolute torture.
Being in Joan's room, on her bed, surrounded by all sorts of stupid stuffed animals and pillows that smelled like her perfume was just . . .insane. Insane and a Very Bad Idea. And yet, here she was. Letting herself be talked into a "makeover" that resulted in nothing more than Joan invading her personal space in hellish ways that had gotten her so frustrated that she had ended up making out with Luke in his stupid room with his stupid science stuff and his stupid lips that were surprisingly adept at the task at hand.
Luke did this one thing every time he kissed her. He would always start off with his hands on her waist, and they would slide to her back before going through her hair to cup her face, and his thumbs would stroke along her cheekbone. She highly doubted it was technique, because this was Luke and Luke did not have technique. She also doubted it was something Glynis had taught him, because she highly doubted that Glynis could even form a coherent thought without stopping five times to twitter. So, she assumed it was just another Luke quirk, like how he bit his bottom lip when he was concentrating on something really hard or the way he compulsively pushed his glasses up his nose. She wondered if Joan would kiss the same way. Somehow, she doubted it. As unexpected as Luke's finesse was, it would seem even more out of place on Joan.
When she really let herself dwell on it, which didn't happen often for the sake of her fragile sanity, she imagined kissing Joan would be a lot like being around Joan. You would get caught up in it and not even realize it was happening until it was too late to do anything about it. Joan a sudden addition to Grace's life. Joan's lips suddenly on Grace's, the corners turned up in a smile. It would be sweet, and soft, and maybe Joan would taste like that vanilla lip-gloss she always puts on. (Grace bought some three weeks ago, but only puts it on before she goes to bed.) Joan would kiss like Joan lived, with a sort of casual ease that she didn't even seem to know she had. Just like Luke kissed how he lived, thorough and always searching but never seeming to find what it was he wanted. She wondered if she wasn't starting to make things even more complicated.
In her recent history with Very Bad Ideas, this had to be the worst. Sitting on a sofa trapped between Girardis and too tense to breathe. She didn't even know what this damn movie was about, just that it was stupid and girly and something that Grace hated on principle and she in no way found Joan's penchant for these pieces of crap oddly endearing. Luke was on her left and she had the sneaking suspicion that he was slowly inching closer to her as the night went on. Joan's feet were in her lap, and her socks had frogs on them. She curled her toes when she yawned, and every time she sat up to reclaim the popcorn bowl from Luke, Grace found herself with a stretchy, overly close lapful of Joan, all hair and smells and arms brushing arms, and lips inches away from her face and she wished they would just fucking finish the popcorn already.
Joan fell asleep with her head curled so close to Grace's shoulder that she could feel the tiny puffs of breath from Joan's mouth on her arm. She turned her head to find Luke looking at her in that way that she hated. It was how he always looked at her right before he somehow found the balls to make the first move, like she was something wild that he was about to tame. It pissed her off that she almost liked that idea. Joan was still breathing obliviously on her arm, and Luke's lips were somewhere around her neck, and Grace was having thoughts that she was absolutely sure were illegal anywhere that wasn't Kentucky.
Luke was whispering something in her ear but she was too distracted by thinking about banjos and racehorses and all the things the fine state of Kentucky had to offer and when did he get so good at this?
"Girardi, don't ruin this with words," she growled.
"No, it's just . . .this is creepy. Joan's asleep right there." He was sitting up and untangling himself from her and dammit, there went those hopes of settling down in a nice, secluded little shack.
"Yeah, well, you started this, geek. I can't help it if you get some sick thrill from macking on me while your sister's in the room."
"Sick thrill from what?" Joan mumbled sleepily, squirming herself into a sitting position on Grace's right.
"Perv boy here made a play for second base while you were sitting on the bench."
"Grace, could you not use sports metaphors at a time like this?" Luke huffed. "Besides, I do not get a sick thrill! Joan, she's clearly delusional." His voice had raised a few octaves the way it always did when he was nervous, and Joan was making the face that she usually reserved for meatloaf day in the cafeteria.
"Luke, eww! God, could you not molest my friends please?" Joan groggily got to her feet, and pulled Grace up by her arm. "Come on, we're going to bed. There are no roaming hands or panting horndogs there."
Sometimes, Grace swore that Joan knew exactly what she was doing.
She was playing with a yo-yo. She was playing with a yo-yo and wearing a scarf, both cast-offs from the Girardi house of unintentional torture. This did not bode well at all. One she could handle. She could focus on the yo-yo and get the geek boy to cast off Glynis like some dead, skinny weight. Or she could focus on the scarf and spend the rest of her high school years in a perpetual state of unrequited lesbian longing. One or the other. Luke or Joan. Boy or Girl. Innie or Outie. Geek or . . .well, when it came down to it, they were both geeks in their own, special ways. But that wasn't the point. The point was, she had to make a choice. And she had to do it soon or she was going to go crazy.
Even Rove had noticed. That said a lot. She was almost positive he knew exactly what the problem was, too. He hadn't said anything; he had just given her this look one day at lunch when she had been seated between Joan and Luke, who were bickering over the last of her fries. One his stupid, stupid looks that managed to say everything he was thinking and nothing at all with the tilt of his head and the cock of his eyebrow. The bastard.
Besides, the fact that she was even sharing her fries meant she was already in way too deep. She didn't need Rove to tell her that. This was all his fault anyway! If he had just pulled himself together and told Joan how he felt, none of this would have happened. They wouldn't have been so caught up in their little will they or won't they world, and when the scales tilted to the "won't" side, Joan wouldn't have clung to Grace, and Grace wouldn't have started having all of these damn . . .feelings. Or maybe it was Joan's fault. She was the one who transferred into AP Chem in the first place, and changed everything. And if Joan had never become a part of Grace's life, she would have never given a thought to the squirrelly kid with the glasses who sat in front of her and stared at her when he thought she wasn't looking. Either way, it was damn well someone's fault. And it certainly wasn't hers.
Except that it kind of was. She was the one who tolerated Joan in the first place. Then she had even stated to grudgingly respect her, which never happened. But Joan had been so . . .Joan. So weird, and so focused on random things, so unapologetically herself. Damn, the girl had snarked on the cheerleaders. If that didn't mean there was substance under all that hair, she didn't know what did. Then she had let that brillo headed Freidman get to her and she had kissed Luke and she hadn't hated it. Even worse, she had let it continue to happen, until she couldn't even convince herself that she was just doing it to spite Joan. She was doing it because she liked it, and that was absolute insanity, and she was pretty sure they didn't make a pill for depraved sexual thoughts about Girardis. She was so irrevocably fucked.
She had to do something. She knew she did. She couldn't go on sleeping at Joan's every weekend and pretending to be grossed out when Joan stood unbearably close to her in the name of hair brushing, or nail painting, or makeup applying. She couldn't keep convincing herself that she was just using Luke to distract herself from Joan and let loose a little tension. As much as she hated to admit it, that stupid twisty thing her stomach did when he kissed her meant something, and it felt suspiciously similar to the twisty stomach thing that happened when Joan's leg brushed against hers during the sickeningly girly weekend sleepovers.
But she couldn't exactly do anything about it either. She was Grace Polk. Grace Polk didn't have stupid, romantic feelings. She didn't put on lip-gloss before she slept and she didn't read books on dead chemists because Luke rambled on about them for hours. She just. . .wore her jacket and pissed people off. She growled at the girls who called her a dyke and spent her weekends hanging out in Rove's garage. She took on little bits of people here and there, she didn't totally fucking lose herself. But most of all? Most of all, Grace Polk did not spend hours at a time bemoaning her own damn teenage drama. What was it going to matter in five years if Luke managed to defy every odd known to man and make her feel like an actual damn girl. It's not like she would even remember the way Joan's skin smelled when she got out of the shower. None of this mattered. None of it. In the end, she was just Grace. So let Luke and Glynis twitter away and peck at each other like birds (he never put his hands on her face when he kissed her) and let Rove realize what a baby voiced freak Iris was and finally go for it with Joan (he had no idea that Joan had moved every sculpture he made her into the back of her closet the night after that stupid concert) and she would just go back to being Grace. Uncomplicated, unfettered by her stupid, damn hormones, and definitely not involved in some creepy, unintentionally incestuous geometric love . . .thing.
After all, Grace had always sucked at geometry.