The Forever Crush Read online

  We assumed they were sent by someone older because they always included some kind of historical factoid related to the PLS or girls in general. I guessed that the messages were from Ms. Russo, or her anonymous source—the former Pink Locker Lady who a while back sent me the Kathrine Switzer race number. She was the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon. Since I’m on the track team now, I had pinned that to my bulletin board at home for good luck.

  Sometimes, I wondered if Edith was writing the notes. She had invited us to be in the Pink Locker Society at the start of school, but we hadn’t heard from her since we were shut down. I wasn’t sure she’d approve of how we had restarted the PLS on our own. (Though I would have loved to get back in touch with her if it meant we could get back into the swank office she had set up for us behind the pink locker doors. Our new basement office was dingy and gross.)

  These pink chain messages reminded us that we were not the first Pink Locker Society members—and we wouldn’t be the last. Nor were we the first group of girls to try to do good stuff. I imagined myself, Piper, and Kate as a chain of pink daisies, rather than a thick metal chain that clanked, like in a haunted house. It was clear from the messages that our flowery chain reached way back in time.

  You are a link in the pink chain. With pride, we point to 1832, when Maria Weston founded the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in Massachusetts. With help from freedom-loving women—and men—slavery was outlawed in the United States in 1865.

  Honestly, I didn’t know what to make of the pink chain messages.

  You are a link in the pink chain. In 1869, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone formed two groups that pushed hard to give women the right to vote in the United States. It took more than 50 years. The 19th amendment was ratified in 1920.

  Was someone hoping that we would do something world-changing? Right then I was content just to help the girls who wrote in with basic questions about middle-school life. And I just assumed everyone thought girls and boys were equal. I was much more interested in talking about how all girls were not equal, but they should be.

  For instance, certain girls at my school, like Taylor Mayweather and Clem Caritas (and sometimes even Piper), seemed to think they were better than everyone else, probably because they were so pretty and grown-up-looking. They were the girls that boys wanted. I was an eighth-grader who still didn’t have her period. And my boyfriend wasn’t really my boyfriend.

  Oh, I know pretty, popular girls have problems, too. Even the most gorgeous girls with seemingly perfect lives are worrying about something, trust me. The Pink Locker Society had hundreds of questions from girls to prove it. And I guess, being a link in the pink chain, it was our job to help them, too.

  But my mind today was focused on my own distressing dilemma: Could I just keep being Forrest’s faux girlfriend forever? Would I one day be his fake fiancée, his pretend wife? I tried to tell myself that this was my best chance with him, even if it was just make-believe. But I also had to admit that this was not a problem Piper, or Clem, or Taylor—or even Kate—would ever have. It felt like I was the only girl in the universe who would ever have this problem.

  Telling Kate and Piper the truth would have been embarrassing, and then the truth would be out there, like a hamster out of its cage. Piper would say something too loud and everyone would find out. Or Kate, in her sweet Kate way, would accidentally reveal the awful truth. This potentially embarrassing moment would be far worse than the time I got caught on video crawling out of my locker (I had been inside our gorgeous secret office for a Pink Locker Society meeting). And it would be worse than people thinking—as they briefly did—that I had a crush on Trevor McCann, Forrest’s brother, a sixth-grader.

  So I had to do something, right? I did what hundreds of girls had already done. I texted a question to the Pink Locker Society.

  Dear PLS,

  Love your site! I hope you can help me with this one. My crush asked me to be his “pretend girlfriend.” I said yes because it seemed like a really good way to get to know him better and convince him to like me for real. Is this a good or a bad idea? And if it’s a bad idea, how do I tell my friends the truth? Do I have to fake-break up with my fake boyfriend?

  In Love ( for real) With a Pretend Boyfriend

  I looked down at my fingers on the phone’s keyboard. Would I really send this in? I spotted an eyelash on the back of my hand. For good luck, I blew it away and hit send.

  Seven

  Being someone’s pretend girlfriend drained me daily. There was no drama between us, like I’d seen with other eighth-grade couples. But I was being an actress all the time, living a secret life. We had so much more contact with each other now that I almost missed the days when he was just my crush. At least then, if he was nice to me, or said hi, I knew it was real. But when your pretend boyfriend sits near you at lunch or smiles at you, what does it mean? I had no idea. It just wasn’t real. Or if part of it was real I’d never be able to figure out which part.

  I needed lots more time to think because my feelings were changing each day. So there I was: head leaned back in the car, eyes closed, letting Mom drive me home from track practice, when she blurted it right out.

  “Jemma, I hear you and Forrest are an item,” my mother said.

  She made it worse by reaching over and giving me a playful swat on the knee.

  I had no idea she knew. And if she knew, who else knew? Dad? Mrs. McCann? It was like someone dropped a heavy jar of marbles and they scattered everywhere. I didn’t know where to begin.

  In my panic, I couldn’t speak so I just wrinkled my nose and shook my head, still facing the windshield. It was like she presented me with a plate of chilled creamed spinach. No, no, take it away! My wish was that the conversation would end immediately and the topic never be raised again.

  “Are you saying no? Or are you saying you just don’t want to discuss it?” Mom asked, smiling now.

  “I’m not saying anything,” I said, and scrunched down in my seat.

  “Well, I just wanted you to know that I knew and that if you ever need to talk about anything, I’m here. First love can be confusing,” Mom said.

  OMG, now she was talking about love. I wonder if I would survive if I flung myself out the car door right now. Probably not.

  “The feelings can be quite intense. I was young once, you know,” she said.

  “Okay, Okay, I get it. Next subject, please,” I said.

  I reached over to turn on the radio and cranked up the volume to a conversation-stopping level. I pretended to be engrossed in the song, which I didn’t even like. I knew only the chorus for sing-along purposes. When the refrain was over, I looked for something, anything, to occupy my mind and my hands as I sat trapped and imprisoned in the front seat next to my mother.

  I fiddled with the glove compartment, looking for nothing in particular. It was then that I heard the sound of my mom starting to cry.

  “Mom? Mom? Are you all right?” I asked. “Did somebody die?”

  Between her sobs, she told me that no one had died and that she was just a little sad that I seemed angry with her. And that it “just hit her” that I was growing up so fast. But as for why she was crying while driving through our neighborhood, she said could not explain it.

  “I haven’t a clue what’s come over me,” she said.

  Then she laughed and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. I laughed with her, but I didn’t like seeing her acting not normal. As far as her crying history, Mom cried like grown-up people do. She cried at funerals and at sad movies. And sometimes when they played those patriotic songs on the Fourth of July. But she was not a weep-at-the-drop-of-a-hat mom.

  I was so lonely in my own thoughts about Forrest that, for a moment, I wished that Mom would have some instant knowledge of the whole situation. Then maybe she’d tell me what to do. Sometimes I got so lonely I told our cat, Donald Hall, about the whole thing. He wasn’t a frisky, friendly cat, but I think he understood. More
than Mom, at least. Within minutes of the Forrest revelation, she was chatting to me about everyday boring stuff, like what time I needed to wake up the next morning and how I should please, please, please stop using a new towel every time I took a shower.

  “Really, Jem. Seven towels a week. Who are you? The Queen of England?”

  Eight

  A better friend would have just tossed the Fat or Not notebook into the nearest trash can and put an end to it. But instead, I handed it to Forrest when we were at our lockers. They were side by side, which gave me plenty of opportunities during the day to make eye contact, say something witty, or appear so irresistible that he would be overcome with emotion and ask me to be his REAL girlfriend. But these encounters were rarely satisfying. Typically, he said nothing at all. Or just hey.

  I decided to give him the Fat or Not notebook because I thought it might make for a good topic of conversation—something that could have sparked more than just a hey. His back was turned so I watched him getting his books from his locker. I didn’t want to get caught staring or startle him. I tried to look busy in my locker, but when he stood up I made my move.

  “Forrest,” I said, “have you had this yet?”

  “Had what?” Forrest asked.

  “The”—I whispered—“Fat or Not book.”

  “Oh, that. No.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “Um, no. Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”

  “Either you do or you don’t. Which?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to get in trouble or have people be mad at me.”

  “So I should keep it or you want it?”

  Really, he was exhausting me.

  He took the notebook and leaned back on his now-closed locker. He lifted one knee and pressed the bottom of his foot against the locker door, striking a pose while he flipped through. I wondered in that moment if he was trying to look cool for me. But then, instead of meeting my gaze, he looked over my left shoulder.

  “McCann! McCann!” squealed Charlotte Bouchard as she came winging by. She casually rested her elbow on Forrest’s shoulder and looked into his eyes.

  “I do believe you have something of mine,” she said, grabbing the notebook. “Gotta go, but keep in touch.”

  We both watched her run down the hall.

  “I guess that’s that,” I said.

  Just as I was about to search my brain for a new topic, Bet arrived.

  “Hello to you both. Did I just see you with the Fat or Not notebook?”

  “You did, but Charlotte took it,” I said.

  “Shoot,” Bet said. “I’m working on a broadcast about it and I just can’t seem to get my hands on it.”

  Bet was always working on a broadcast. She’s the anchorperson for Margaret Simon Middle School’s only TV show, You Bet! It isn’t exactly real TV. Bet produces her video reports and the principal broadcasts them on the school’s TV network every Friday afternoon.

  “If I see it again, I’ll grab it for you,” I said.

  “Thank you, Jemma. You’re the best.”

  Bet squeezed my arm gently, in a conspiratorial way, and left. Bet knew how much I liked Forrest and for how long. That squeeze was her way of congratulating me. I looked at Forrest to see if he caught this girl-to-girl signal.

  “Jemma,” Forrest said, “I have to ask you something.”

  I swallowed and waited.

  Please God, don’t let him break up with me already.

  So many girls liked him, and it seemed like it would be just a matter of time until he’d like one of them in a real way. And then I’d just be a failed experiment for him, something he might joke with me about at our high school graduation.

  “There’s this movie thing that I’m invited to this weekend, the day after Thanksgiving. People are bringing girlfriends, so it would be weird if you didn’t come.”

  “Oh.”

  “Unless you have something else to do. I guess I could say you have to go visit your grandmother or something.”

  “My grandmother lives in Florida. It takes, like, eighteen hours to drive there.”

  “So you want to go to this thing?”

  “Um, sure. Why not? Might as well keep up the act, right?” I said this to check if this was him asking me out on a real date, or a date to keep up appearances for our pretend relationship.

  “Yeah. I think everyone is convinced,” Forrest said.

  Nine

  I waited, like lots of other girls, for the Pink Locker Society to answer my question. We were getting so many messages from girls wanting help that I had to pull my question from the very deep inbox and ask that we take it on.

  “What about this one who says she’s got a pretend boyfriend?” I asked Piper and Kate during a PLS meeting.

  “Yeah, I saw that one,” Piper said. “But do you think it’s even real? Who has a pretend boyfriend?”

  It took all my strength not to answer, “It’s me! It’s me! And it’s driving me crazy.”

  Kate swooped in, so naturally helpful.

  “I think it could be true. And she says she really likes our Web site. Why not?” she said.

  “Okay, Jemma. That falls into the topic of embarrassing things, so I think it’s yours.”

  “Why is that so embarrassing?” I asked Piper, hoping it wouldn’t blow my cover.

  “An imaginary boyfriend? It’s like she’s going around introducing everyone to her invisible friend Harvey, a six-foot-tall bunny rabbit,” Piper said.

  I stayed quiet and let Kate defend me.

  “Well, if you look again at the message, it’s not that she invented a boyfriend out of thin air,” Kate said. “She and this real guy are pretending to go out. Seems different than a completely invented boyfriend. I’ll take this one.”

  Hurray! I was going to get Kate’s four-star advice without her knowing that it was me.

  “Speaking of boyfriends,” Piper said. “Jemma, I hear you’re going to dinner and a movie with Forrest on Friday night.”

  “Dinner and a movie” turned out to be something dreamed up by the beautiful Clem Caritas. Yes, my not-so-friendly locker neighbor. Once a month, a select group of eighth-graders made dinner at someone’s house and then went to see a movie. I had never been invited before.

  “Oh, goodie,” Kate said. “Me and Brett are going, too.”

  “And I’ll be there with Dylan,” Piper said.

  Dylan was the latest of Piper’s boyfriends. He was in ninth grade—a high-school guy!—and played ice hockey.

  “A triple date…,” I said a little blandly.

  I was worried about all those eyes on Forrest and me. Surely these girls who knew me so well would be able to tell that Forrest and I were a big fat fake.

  “Moving on,” Kate said, turning back to the laptop. “Oh crud, study hall is almost over.”

  It was hard to keep track of the time down in the school basement. There were no clocks. Were we really still the Pink Locker Society if we hadn’t stepped through our pink lockers in weeks? I tried not to think about our beautiful and well-appointed offices now that they were off-limits. It felt like forever ago that we opened our lockers on the first day of school and saw them—the pink locker doors inside our regular lockers. Ever since Principal F. shut us down, we had to keep jackets hung up in our lockers to hide the secret pink doors.

  But while I was dreaming of our comfy couch, ergonomic desk chairs, and conference table, Kate was still thinking about Emma Shrewsberry and that question about being fat. It was assigned to me and I hadn’t come up with an answer yet.

  “What have you found out?” Kate asked.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  This was like saying “I’m almost there,” when I actually hadn’t even left the house. I assumed there would be some kind of easy answer to her question. There wasn’t.

  “Well, remember that it’s a two-part question,” Kate said. “She wants to know how to find out for sure if she’s fat or not. And, if she is, she
wants to know how to lose weight fast.”

  I made a mental note to talk with Bet, who was already investigating the Fat or Not notebook.

  “Ugh,” Piper said.

  “What?” asked Kate.

  “It’s nothing. Just a stupid message,” Piper said.

  “Let me see,” I said, and turned the laptop toward me.

  The girls who write this stuff are trashy and cheap. What if boys see this? STOP now!!

  Your worst enemy

  The three of us were silent for a moment. When girls called girls stuff like that, we knew it was code for other more shocking words. They were like curse words, but it was more than that. They were words that hurt girls and made them feel deeply bad about themselves. Parents would fall over with shock if they knew how often girls in middle school hear them.

  A mean eighth-grader, now moved on to high school, thankfully, once called me one of those shocking words on the school bus. I was only in sixth grade and I didn’t know what it meant. I had to ask my mother, which led, as you might expect, to my mom actually boarding the bus the next day to discuss the matter with the bus driver. Once I knew the definition I felt better because it in no way applied to me. I hadn’t even kissed a boy then.

  “There is this high-school girl,” Piper said in a small voice. “She hates me because I’m going out with Dylan. I think it could be her.”

  Piper had been called those mean names before, plenty of times, actually. You could tell by her quiet voice and the way she stared at the floor as she spoke. Piper sometimes joked, “Beauty is my curse.” But this was one of those times that it actually seemed true. More often than us regular girls, the prettiest girls got called trashy, cheap, and worse.

  “I’m sorry she’s being mean to you, Piper,” I said. “But that would mean she knows that you specifically are in the Pink Locker Society. Very few people know, right? High-school girls probably don’t know about us.”

  “I guess that’s right,” she said.