Chapter 8: In Which Sweet Scadenfreude Feels so Good and Bad
“You’re staring at Alec.”
Hannah’s words startled me back to the reality. I tried to cover my gasping by coughing, but to no avail. As soon as Hannah saw me choking, she giggled and slapped my back.
“You totally were!”
“I wasn’t!” I hissed, since we were still in class. Prof. Burgundy was droning on about how the Japan was dropping bombs on the America. It would have been informative if he hadn’t been telling on the same stories for the last three weeks.
Hannah smiled. The smile looked wicked.
“Hannah,” I enunciated her name carefully. “I wasn’t.”
And it was the truth.
Okay, half of the truth.
…
Fine. It was a lie.
But it meant nothing. Like always Alec was either texting or playing games or chatting (albeit in very low
volume) with his friends. He always hated studying, but magically his smart brain always made him to go by just fine. I didn’t look at him to admire the way his shoulder blade flexed when he stretched, or how the little veins on his neck popped when he was concentrating on his (brand new) Samsung Galaxy. I was just wondering how in the freaking hell someone so lazy become so smart.
Yes. It was the truth.
“Andrea,” Hannah said in a sing song voice. “Do you finally develop a crush on Alec?”
“And complete the circle between all the fifteen of us? Hell no.”
“It’s totally okay, you know,” she nudged at me. “I mean, I can understand.”
“Hey, I don’t like him. He’s a narcissistic player who uses women to stroke his ego.”
“But he’s nice,” Hannah gushed. It’s a wonder how she never talked anything bad about him even after their nasty break-up. Then again, nearly all of Alec’s exes never talked about him. “He’s a gentleman if you let him be. And he’s very generous.”
“Now that’s the part that I don’t like. He thinks his money can buy him everything, from status and even love.
That’s low.”
Suddenly, the girl in front of us turned around. It was Bernadette, a blonde that defied all the stereotypes.
Bernadette wasn’t only uber-smart and the class future valedictorian, she was also head of the journalism committee in our school. I heard from the grapevine that she was aiming to be a lawyer.
“If you girl can stop whoring,” her pale lips were pouted in such a way that made it look like a punchbag to me.
“then maybe Alec can stop thinking of you girl as whores.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Bernadette?” Hannah beat me into jeering at her first.
“I was just saying,” Bernadette did this thing where she lifted up her chin and looked at people from above her nose, it was absolutely annoying. “that maybe if you girls aren’t throwing yourself at him, he would have respected you more.”
“Nobody’s throwing herself at him!” Hannah said.
-twitch- Bernadette did her thing once more. “Well, obviously both of your brains are filled with too much pom-pom to understand my point.”
By this point, my whole body became hot with unreleased anger. If only we weren’t in class and Bernadette weren’t a girl, I’d have her pinned under me and distort her face into a mush. I always hated it when people categorized girls that danced or girls that were in cheerleaders club to be dumb bimbos. Bernadette especially was so fond of reminding people that she was smart and she was no ordinary girl.
She was right. She was the only girl who always got into my nerves.
“Listen, Bernadette,” I narrowed my eyes and put on my most aggressive face. “You’re lucky I’m in good mood.
So if you turn around right now and stop talking, I might not punch you.”
She didn’t lose even a beat. “Listen, Andrea,” she said in the same fashion I’d talked. “You’re lucky that I’m such a generous person, so generous, in fact, that I’ll tell you this.”
She scooted even closer to us, and then whispered to me. “The boys are calling you a nasty lesbian because you punch boys who like you. The girls are afraid of you because you’re too violent and you always look like you’re going to go berserk.”
Bernadette drew back, and now I could see her face turning smug. “So I don’t think it’s a good idea if you punch me.”
My mind was so busy trying to process the words that she said to me to even bother responding to her. When I rubbed my temple, I realized that I was sweating. Not only that, Hannah was looking at me with such concerned face I might have thought I was bleeding to death.
“You… bitch!” There was so much venom in Hannah’s words, but Bernadette didn’t flinch. In an easy grace, she spurned around from us. From her upturned cheek, I could tell that she was smiling.
“Don’t mind her, Andrea. You know how much of a lying bitch she is.” when I realized it, Hannah had already half hugged me. She rubbed my shoulder, and my eyes could finally see things without all the blur. The shock of Bernadette’s revelations settled on my stomach, giving it a cruel twist.
“I-I think I need to go to the toilet,” I said, forcing a smile.
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“No.”
“Hey, Andrea, she was lying, okay?”
I nodded, but I felt empty. “I know.”
Something flashed on Hannah’s eyes. Something that I hated so much. “Andrea…”
Pity.
I left the classroom.
-My eyes were dry, my mouth was aching, and my whole body felt like it had been bludgeoned everywhere. I tried everything, from slapping myself to scrunching up myself, but still I couldn’t cry.
Shit. Why couldn’t I be at least more normal?
I knew the normal social convention for this. I should be crawling my eyes out, I should be phoning all of my friends telling them that there was someone that they should crush. I had just been verbally abused in the worst way possible, and my chest hurt like hell, but still nothing came out from my eyes. It was crazy.
“Andrea, you fucker,” I said to my reflection. The girl on the mirror stared back at me, her red hair was all over the place and the eyes looked insane. I looked insane.
The boys are calling you a nasty lesbian because you punch boys who like you. The girls are afraid of you because you’re too violent and you always look like you’re going to go berserk
As I looked at myself, Bernadette’s words rang inside the back of my head. I gritted my teeth, feeling the inexplicable urge to punch something, anything, but then refrained myself. No. I shouldn’t. Be a little more ladylike. Be a little more approachable.
But seriously, do people really think that way of me? Am I really a beast to them?
As I was still busy pondering about it, I heard a knock from the door. It was weird, because usually girls just barge in the toilet without knocking. In about two seconds, however, I found out why this particular person needed to knock.
“Are you in there, Andrea?”
It was Alec, ergo, a male, ergo, a creature forbidden from this sacred chamber.
How very fantastic.
“She’s not!” I shouted back.
“Then why do you have the same exact voice as her?”
“Maybe we just have the same kind of voice chords.”
“Or maybe you’re inside, Andrea,” there was a smile on his tone.
Against my will, my heart skipped a beat. I hated it when it happened. It felt so uncomfortable to be rendered useless and not to mention jelly-like at unexpected times.
Unfortunately, this scumbag heart of mine kept stopping itself so much lately. Especially in occasions where Alec was around.
“Andrea?” another knock. “Hey, what happened?”
Ba-dump.
“Nothing. I just wanted to take a dump.”
“I saw Bernadette talking to you,” at this point, there was an evident concern dripping his voice.
“She talks to everybody. I also talk to everybody. It’s not such a rare occurrence that we talk to each other.”
“Yeah, but she can be a venomous bitch, and from the way her face changes after she talked to you, I know that she’s been saying nasty things to you.”
Ba-dump. Ba-dump.
Oh, come on. Stay inside your ribcage, will you?!
“Go, Alec. I’m fine.” There was a pause. “And I’m not lying that I’m fine because I want you to keep trying, I’m really fine and I really want you to go.”
I heard a disappointed sigh.
“I’ll go after I see your face.”
I cast a sideway glance to the mirror. My reflection glanced back at me, and what I saw wasn’t something I’d let other people see. My make up wasn’t smudged but the traces of stress were pretty evident on my face.
“No way,” I decided. “I’m ugly right now.”
Even I was surprised how the words slipped out my tongue. ‘I’m ugly right now’?! What the hell? I wasn’t an insecure little doormat with no backbone. I was confident with my looks and ability, and I never, ever, ever try to fish compliments from boys by telling them that I’m ugly.
Except for this one time.
Alec didn’t say anything for a while, and again my scumbag heart gradually slowed its beating, making sweat break out in various places from my body. If a doctor ever checked on how sporadic my heartbeat was, he would have reached the conclusion that I was an emergency.
“Well, I don’t really care if you’re currently ugly or not,” he said noncommittally, so noncommittally, in fact, that I felt offended. “I just want to make sure that you’re okay.”
I rolled my eyes, disappointed in him, but most of it, disappointed in myself. Of course, why the hell should he care? “If you so want to see me, why don’t you just open the door?”
“Because I’ll look like a pervert if I try to enter the ladies’ bathroom.”
“You turned on a porn movie when I was in your room,” I reminded him of last week.
“Yeah, and you picked up my magazine and I read it in front of you. So what? It all happened in my house, and in school, things are different.”
That was when it clicked within my head. Alec was right. Things are different here. At his house, he was the absolute ruler, he made the rules and he could choose whether or not he’d obey it. At school, however, he had a reputation to uphold. A reputation as fragile as a glass.
Unlike me, Alec cared a lot about how people thought of him.
“But, what the hell,” he said as he opened the door.
“Hi, pervert,” I waved my hand to him.
He grimaced. “Stop it.”
“You see my face, now scram,” I pointed to over his shoulder.
“What did she say to you?” he took one step closer.
Concealing my gulping, I went to the end of the room and rested my back on the wall. “Just this and that.
Bernadette has always been obsessive about practically everything.”
“Why do you leave, then?”
I pretended to roll my eyes. “I had to take a dump.”
“Yeah, and Bernadette looked so darn satisfied because you have such a great bowel movement,” Alec put a hand on his hip. “Seriously Andrea, don’t lie to me. I’ve been hearing a lot of rumors about her.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“That she likes me,” he said casually, without even blushing when admitting it. Alec had known for a fact that girls fall for him all the time. It was so annoying to see him taking all these affection for granted.
“Your confidence is so endearing, Alec.”
“I’m being serious. Bernadette thinks that you like me, too, and knowing her, she might be plotting crazy things to you.”
“Yeah, right,” I put a hand on my hip. “You seem to forget the fact that I have fourteen fierce cheerleader friends and that I’m pretty strong myself.”
Alec was about to open his mouth when I realized something. “And what makes her think that I like you?!”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Some girls are just born with brains that couldn’t seem to function properly.”
“Just like how some guys are born with small dicks?” I snapped, suddenly enraged that he was demeaning girls in general. “Sorry, it was rude.”
“And childish,” he laughed. “It’s okay, though. I can be a dick sometimes.”
“If by sometimes, you mean, all the time,” I felt a smile forming on my lips. “Let’s go back, before anyone spots you here and calls you a pervert.”
“Agreed.”
I walked past him, but just suddenly, my whole body was tingling all over. My neck felt a little ticklish and when I turned, I saw his finger already grazing against my neck.
Out of instinct, I immediately jumped away from him. “What are you doing?!”
“Just checking the hickey I gave you,” he said, the grin was still in place. “It’s already gone, huh?”
Suddenly, my brain was malfunctioning and I seemed to have developed a speech impediment. I couldn’t answer nor think clearly about the hickey. The memories from last week rushed back inside my brain, despite the fact that I’d tried my best forgetting it.
“I’ve been putting aloe-vera on it,” I say. “Generously. Every. Single. Fucking. Day.”
He frowned. “Geez. Don’t you girls usually love parading around with hickeys? It’s like saying that you’re hot and you know it.”
I shot him a glare that promised injury. “Careful, Alec.”
He broke into a laugh. “I was just kidding. Glad to see your fire came back, Andrea. I was worried back there.
You looked so forlorn.”
Goosebump ran on my arms. “Ugh. Forlorn. Don’t ever associate me with that word.”
“Forlorn,” Alec started chanting in the most childish way he could ever be. “Forlorn, Forlorn, Forlorn. Andrea is a forlorn little girl in the verge of tears.”
I was about to chase the hell out of him, when I saw the door opening. I stood there, frozen, as Alec quickly sneaked into one of the stalls. And then, a second later, Bernadette’s corn-colored hair materialized.
She smirked when she saw me. “Been crying here, huh?” she lifted her chin again. I’d just noticed that it was a habit that she did whenever she felt superior to the person she was talking to. “You’re not as hard as you’ve been trying to show us, Andrea.”
My nose flared as she walked to in front of the mirror and started to open her beauty case. I snorted, but found no words that were witty enough to shoot back at her.
“What? Are you not going to punch me?” she was taunting me, I knew even that much. “Isn’t that how you deal with people who tell the truth to you, Andrea? Go on, I won’t even punch back.”
I was at the ends of my wits. I so wanted to get back at her. I wanted her to hurt more, much more than she had hurt me. But I couldn’t do anything. She was much better at forming poisonous words than me, being in a debate team, so embarking in a shouting competition wouldn’t work. Punching her or slapping her would only mean defeat, since by doing that, Bernadette would prove her point; that I was a beast; that I needed counseling; that I was scary.
So I did something else. Something far crueler. Something that would surely make her break.
I opened the stall where Alec was hiding. He gasped as his cover was snatched away, and he awkwardly waved at Bernadette, who stared at him from the mirror with widened eyes.
That expression was absolutely priceless.
“Let’s go back to the class, Alec,” I said, smiling up to him while I stroked his arm.
Alec stared at me long and hard, and then his gaze went to Bernadette, to her shell-shocked face. He let out a long sigh, before then grinning up to me, his white teeth blinking. “Alright, Andrea,” he said in a tone that he’d never
used at me before. It was a tone that was fraught with affections, a tone that someone would only use to his or her loved ones.
Bernadette still hadn’t quite recovered from her shock. She knew better than to just start screaming,
unfortunately, and instead slowly turned around. Her smile was tremulous and obviously forced. “W-What are you doing here, Alec? This is the girls’ restroom.”
“I was obviously here,” Alec started as he glanced at me. There was a moment of hesitation in his eyes and I bit my lip. What if he didn’t want to help me? What if he decided that it was too much work and chose to humiliate me intead? What
if-“to comfort Andrea, of course. I was quite worried,” he finished with a smile so contagious that Bernadette couldn’t help smiling back at him, too.
“I-I see,” she stammered. She was fumbling with her lipstick, and the frown on her forehead hadn’t quite retracted.
I hid a gloating snort with a girly giggle. It was one of my personal policy to not giggle, but I couldn’t help it. It was still heart-breaking, though, to see Bernadette making this kind of face. Usually she was so stern, so set.
Sometimes I even thought that she was like me.
But Alec wasn’t quite finished. In a swift motion, he grabbed my hand and intertwined our fingers. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”
Before the door closed, I managed to see Bernadette hyperventilated. For a moment I felt bad, but then I
remembered the words that she’d spat at me, her satisfaction upon seeing me breaking down and I couldn’t help feeling a surge of gratification seeing her like this.
Still, though…
“It’s a little mean, Alec,” I whispered to him after we were far enough from the bathroom. “You know that she likes you.”
“Yeah, and she needs to know that I don’t like bitches.”
And that was it. We didn’t exchange anything more than that, and when we reached class, he slowly released my hand. Only after the change of warmth that I realized that we’ve been holding hands all along and heat surged up to my face. When I came back to my seat, Hannah smiled giddily at me.
“He totally ran after you, Andrea, right after you left.” she said. “I think the girl that he likes is you.”
Oh, right. The rumors.
“No,” I shook my head. He didn’t like me. He liked Ms. Maid, but that’s only because she was a fictional person based on Dani and she wasn’t showing him her face. “He doesn’t.”
“I think he does,” she nodded her head up and down dramatically.
Before I could reply to that, the door opened and I saw Bernadette coming back. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she was sniffing occasionally. But despite that, she managed to shot me a glare before sitting in front of me.
Before I could reply to that, the door opened and I saw Bernadette coming back. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she was sniffing occasionally. But despite that, she managed to shot me a glare before sitting in front of me.