Chapter 5

"I don't care who he is," Carmen chirped, "who is he? He's dreamy!"

Liz rolled her eyes. "You have a boyfriend," she said. "If anyone gets dibs on this Weston guy, it's Danielle."

"Right," said Danielle, laughing, "assuming he would, you know, look at me twice. He's been at the school for two weeks, I'm pretty sure he's heard about 'Nutty Nellie' by now."

"He may have heard," said Liz, "but would he listen?"

Danielle didn't bother to get her hopes up. Shelly Baumgarter's campaign of poisoning Danielle's reputation had been largely successful, at least partially because Danielle didn't bother to defend herself: when asked, she told the truth. And that scared the students of Sheldon Oaks Public High School, most of whom weren't yet willing to admit that normal people could have abnormal problems. They were the children of privilege, of upper-middle-class parents who had braved the astronomical local housing prices to get their kids into the prestigious school district here; they had been sheltered all their lives. Danielle knew this for a fact because she was one of them. But one of her preconceptions was gone now: that she was insulated. She no longer believed that tragedy and accident and chaos happened only to 'other people.' She was other people.

And other people she had become. Ever since her return to school in January, she had become a social outcast; there were people who were steering clear of Liz and Carmen and Heidi and Amy now, merely because they were associated with her—Vanessa, for instance. Danielle was always last now to be picked in PE, for school projects, for lab work. And, true to her predictions, she had not been asked out once since last summer.

The good news was, David hadn't managed to stay with Missy Renquist for any meaningful amount of time; she hadn't heard about it until after she came out of her catatonia, but the two had broken up within a couple of weeks. Whether David had managed to dip his wick with her was a topic in which Danielle had no real interest. Supposedly he was dating Angela Wentworth now; she would run into them in the halls on occasion. Beyond that, she had not had any contact with him whatsoever, and she was fine with that.

She wondered if anyone had managed to tell her that David's little liaison with Missy had been so catastrophic. Surely, if Liz had heard, she would've told her, in hopes of jollying her out of her depression; but Danielle still had very little recollection of what had gone on in those five missing months. She remembered occasional bouts of desperation: sitting there wondering if there was anything she could do, any promises she could make, that would bring him back to her. At other times she raged, fumed, felt anger making her blood sing; there were depressions in the wall of her bedroom that seemed to have been made by her fist. Ned and Katrina Stanton assured her that these were some of the main stages of grief. But by and large, she remembered nothing; she had been gone, and that was that.

Amy Plisken was talking; Danielle was startled to realize that the conversation had not moved on. "He might listen. I mean, yeah, a lot of people are just ignoring you, Dani, but others aren't. We're here."

She certainly was. It had been early February when Amy suddenly appeared at their bench in the quad, asking if she might hang out with them. "I saw what Shelly did to you. God help me, I even helped her with it, a little. But I hated it. And when I saw the way they looked at me, the way they treated me, I realized ... Hey, they'd do the same to me at the drop of a hat. If they thought it'd get them somewhere, they'd slander me too. And I thought, you know, there are lots of people I would really rather spend time with."

"Oh?" Liz had asked, somewhat defensive. "Like who?"

"Well, I dunno yet, but I hoped a few of 'em might be here," Amy had answered, grinning. Her presence had helped restore some of the luster that had been stripped from Liz's reputation. Not much of it, but some. Carmen and Heidi had gone nuts, of course, at the presence of another outcast from Shelly Baumgarter's circle. And soon she and Liz were trading outrageous teacher stories and laughing. Now Amy's presence seemed as natural as breathing.

"That's true," said Danielle, "you are here." She smiled to hide her own thoughts: that Carmen and Heidi would probably just as well be elsewhere, but had nowhere else to go. But there was no way to test it, and in any case Danielle knew she might be being unfair to them. Carmen and Heidi were nice people, for all that they seemed so ... Young. Seriously, how could high school seniors still twitter like birds that way?

"He's been looking at you," Amy told her.

"Oh?" said Danielle. "Who?"

Amy tossed her hands in exasperation. "Our hot new friend from Indiana, that's who! Mr. Whatshisface!" ("Weston," Liz supplied.) "The hot new transfer student every girl in the school has been cooing about!"

"He's not that hot," said Danielle, which was the absolute truth; there were boys more handsome than Weston McCullough at Sherman Oaks. He wasn't McDreamy or anything. But Weston had something more than: manners. He had a smile and a kind word for everybody, he could make anyone laugh, and he never (to anyone's knowledge) made rude comments about a girl's behind. The younger boys, especially the single ones, laughed that he must be some sort of pussy; some of the girls did too. But Danielle knew better. Mr. Whatshisface, as Amy had so eloquently named him, had decided long ago to not be a jerk, and his training was beginning to pay off. David had been much the same.

"He's hot enough," Amy retorted. "Besides, all men look the same in the dark." She giggled.

Danielle rolled her eyes. Amy had it backwards, somehow: while Carmen's and Heidi's boyfriends were pressuring them for sex, and Liz and Martin did it regularly, Amy had somehow ended up with a bespectacled, tie-wearing churchgoer named Connor who wanted to wait until marriage. And he wasn't even taking the 'technical virginity' line: his rule was 'nothing below the neck, ' and he stuck to it. Amy, who had lost her innocence to a vibrator long ago, was starting to get impatient. "Maybe you should jump on him, then," she said. "Get your kicks that way."

"Don't tempt me," said Amy, laughing.

"Now now," said Liz, overhearing, "let's keep our priorities in order, girls. Dani is single. You're not. That's where we focus."

"But what if I wanna be the focus," Amy said, laughing.

"Then dump Connor," said Liz with a grin. "Or, for that matter, swap him for Max. That way Connor and Heidi can be virgins together, and you and Max can screw your brains out."

"Max?" said Amy. "Max Cheng? God, have you seen his teeth?" They had joked about this many times before, and Danielle recognized with a rush of gratitude Liz's subtle hand once again at work, deflecting attention away from her.

The simple fact was, Danielle was single, and she didn't think that would change any time soon. She would just have to live with it. So far, she was doing an okay job.

But sometimes it irked her.

Rather against her will, it came out during therapy that afternoon. She was sitting in the Stantons' office trying to think of something to talk about, while Ned's wife waited patiently. Finally, before she knew she was going to say it, it blurted out: "All my friends say there's a guy I should be interested in."

Katrina Stanton tilted her head, exactly the same way her husband did it; she wondered which of them had started it. Because of the unevenness of their schedules, the Stantons had been forced to trade Danielle between them at times; sometimes it was Ned who saw her, sometimes Katrina, sometimes both at once. Katrina lacked her husband's easiness with laughter; even when she was smiling, there was a melancholy in her eyes. But she was an excellent listener, and there were things she understood about Danielle without having to ask—or, indeed, without Danielle having to even say it. Danielle thought this might be because they were both women; or perhaps that was just the way Katrina Stanton was.

"And what do you think about this?" Katrina asked her.

"Oh, he's ... Well, he's attractive, no doubt about that," said Danielle. "He just transferred in at the beginning of the week, so nobody really knows him—I mean, I only know his name because we've got a class together. But about half the girls in the school are all a-flutter over him now. Everyone says he's nice and funny and polite, and he's definitely handsome ... Everybody's all asking me for, you know, the inside scoop on him or whatever, but there's not much I can say yet, it's not like I've known him for any longer than they have. What do I know about..." She looked up. "What?"

Katrina Stanton was smiling. "I meant, what do you think about your friends saying you should date again. But I think I like this answer more. So, you're attracted to him."

"What?" said Danielle. "No I'm not! I didn't say that!"

"Not using those words, no," said Katrina, still with that gentle smile, "but you immediately started talking about him. With a level of detail that suggests you've been paying attention to him. You find him attractive."

"Well ... Yeah," said Danielle, feeling a little like she was confessing something sinful.

"And that's ... Bad?" said Katrina Stanton.

"Well ... It isn't ... It's not bad, per se," said Danielle, "but ... I feel like I'm borrowing trouble."

"Why?"

"Because ... Because it ... Look, I have a reputation," Danielle said finally. "Nutty Nellie and all that. I'm a non-entity as far as the school is concerned; they prefer to just close their eyes and pretend I don't exist. No matter what, he's gonna ... Whatever he hears first about me, it isn't gonna be from my mouth."

"Unless you speak to him first," said Katrina. "Which is, I think, the reason why your girl friends think you should be interested in him. You can get your foot in the door long before the rumor mill does.

"Yeah right," Danielle grumped, "he's been here two weeks."

"And do you really think two weeks is long enough for him to have acclimated and started asking questions about individual people?" said Katrina. "You still have time. And besides, you know you're tired of being single. You bear up well, Danielle, but anyone who knows you well, knows it's been grating on you."

"It's not ... I don't..." Danielle sighed. "It's just hard. You know? Everyone else I know is dating somebody." Liz and Martin had been going steady for nearly two years—which was an eternity in high school—and Amy had been with Connor for over a year. Carmen had been asked out by Jeff Rogers for junior prom, and the two had kept dating ever since; and now even Heidi had a boyfriend!—dumpy, stoop-shouldered, pear-shaped Heidi! If those girls could succeed, why couldn't she? What did they have that she didn't? ... Besides a five-month gap in their transcripts, and wrists free of scars.

Even though it had been more than a year—well, only somewhat, since that missing five months only counted a little bit; but on the calendar it had been more than a year—she still found herself missing him at odd moments. She would think, Oh, that's something David would want to hear, before remembering that she couldn't tell him. She would catch a trace of the smell of his hair; she would wake up feeling naked and cold, wishing for arms to hold her. She even missed sex; no matter how she had tried to duplicate it in the days since then, it just wasn't the same with only one person in the bed. She'd hadn't even known how masturbate; ever since she and David had shared their secret places together that night so long ago, she'd never needed to touch herself: he was always on hand, always willing. It was galling to realize that he was better at playing with her than she was at playing with herself.

"It's hard to be a fifth wheel," Katrina agreed. "Or, in your situation, a ninth wheel. But that being the case, why don't you take your friends' advice? You don't want to be single. They don't want you to be single. Why not take the plunge?"

"Well, he's gotta ask me out," said Danielle.

"For much of human history, that's been true," Katrina Stanton said, "but we live in a new age now. You can ask him."

"But what if he's one of those old-fashioned people who thinks the man should do the asking?" she said.

"If you feel like it's too big a risk, then don't ask him," said Katrina. "But Danielle, you don't have to be his girlfriend to have a presence in his life. Offer to be his friend. He probably doesn't have too many people of those right now, so that will recommend you to him. And in the meanwhile, he has plenty of time to figure out whether he wants to ask you out or not."

"Well," said Danielle, hesitant.

"What do you have to lose?" said Katrina. "Let's say you talk to him, get to know him, maybe even date him a little. Perhaps he decides you're crazy, or undesirable, or just not right for him. In that case, nothing has changed: that's where the two of you stand now. And, if, on the other hand, he dates you and you two hit it off, then now you have a boyfriend, or at least a new friend, and you're no longer quite so frustrated. You've gained something."

"It's not just frustration," Danielle said. "I mean, it's not like I was gonna drag him into bed with me first thing, or something."

She saw Katrina Stanton blink in surprise. "Well. That's not actually the frustration I was referring to. But yes, that too would be addressed, or at least could be."

Danielle felt her face heat. "I, umm. I hope you don't think that ... Well ... I'm not—"

"A pervert?" said Katrina, smiling. "I certainly hope not. If having a healthy sex drive makes someone a pervert nowadays, I'm afraid I'd be right there in the camp with you. And most of the people I know. And, probably, most of the people you know too. We're moving in a good direction in terms of sexual mores. It isn't considered quite as abnormal for a woman to have actual interest in sex. And," she added, her eyes twinkling, "it certainly makes you more popular with the boys. Such as this fellow your friends are advocating."