16 Things I Thought were True Part 19

6. Everyone is embarra.s.sed by the same things.

#thingsIthoughtweretrue M y hands are filthy. There's grease all over my s.h.i.+rt. The tow truck is canceled and there's a fiery orange explosion in my chest. I'm prouder than Michael Phelps's mom at the Olympics.

The little donut spare is on, and I catch my reflection in the window and see the girl looking back at me glowing with pride.

When Amy pulls into the last gas station right before the border crossing, we pile out for a bathroom break and clean up. I check my follower status. 4444. All fours. I take that as a good sign.

Soon, we pull up to the border. There are only a few cars in front of us to cross, but each one seems to take forever to get cleared through.

The car clock seems stalled; the minutes crawl by. When it's finally our turn, the officer stares down each of us while he checks over our pa.s.sports. Amy starts to babble, but I poke her in the side and she stops.

"What's your purpose in Canada?" he asks me.

"I'm going to see my dad," I tell him.

"She's never met him," Amy adds. "He left her mom before she was born."

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J a n e t G u r t l e r The officer leans in closer and studies me. "That true?"

I nod. He glances in the backseat at Adam. "We're here for moral support," Adam says and smiles bigger than necessary.

The officer writes something on his clipboard and then looks back at me. His expression softens. "I have a daughter your age.

I don't get to see her much." He hands Amy our pa.s.sports. "You kids drive safe." He steps back from the car and waves us through.

We're quiet until we're a few minutes away from the crossing, and then I scream and woo- hoo at the top of my lungs. Amy and Adam join in.

After a car dance mini celebration, I check the GPS. "We're on 264th Street and it'll take us to highway 1. Then we head west to Vancouver," I tell Amy. "We're going to be tight for time."

"I don't want to get a speeding ticket," she says. "It's the one thing my dad would freak about." Amy drives for about five minutes and then sighs. "This scenery is exactly like Was.h.i.+ngton."

"You want more Cheezies? Another Mountain Dew?" I ask.

Amy shakes her head. "We could play table topics."

I reach for the popcorn twists and shovel a handful in my mouth.

"Table topics?"

She glances over, as if I'm an alien or have grown a third eye.

"Only the best game on the planet. It's a card game, like a conver- sation starter."

I shrug and glance back at Adam. He shrugs too.

"You seriously don't know? There are, like, thirty editions or something. We have more than half of them."

I shrug again. "Sorry."

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1 6 t h i n g s i t h o u g h t w e r e t r u e "You wanna play? Adam?"

"Why not?" Adam says.

Amy bounces up and down on her seat. "Yay! Look in the glove compartment, Morgan. There's a set in there." I open the glove box and see a red, cubed stack of cards and take it out.

"How do you play?" I ask.

"It's easy. You just pick a card, read it, and then everyone has to share."

"How do you win?" Adam asks.

"You don't win. You talk."

"No one wins?" Adam says.

"Your family puts a lot of value on talking," I mumble.

She narrows her eyes into slits. "Yes. Unlike yours, we don't sweep everything under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist."

"How did you nail us so well?" I grin.

"Um, your mom never told you who your father was until you were eighteen."

"Point taken," I say.

"Sounds like a useless game," Adam mumbles. "No one even wins."

Amy gestures at the cube. "Just take one," she says to me.

I open up the box, take out the top card, and flip it over. I read it and frown, biting my lip. I reach in my pocket for ChapStick and apply it.

"What does it say?" Amy yells.

I clear my throat. "What is the most embarra.s.sing thing that's happened to you and what did it teach you?" I read.

The silence seems infinite and obnoxiously loud.

"Well, I guess that's obvious," Amy finally says. "Everyone in 121.

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J a n e t G u r t l e r Tadita saw you dancing around in men's underwear. To that song."

She hums "s.e.xy and I Know It."

"Okay," I say. "We got it."

Amy nods. "But what did it teach you?"

My face burns. "Never to run out of clean underwear? G.o.d. I needed clean underwear and my mom hadn't done the wash, so she gave me an unopened pack of boys' underwear. She said it didn't matter since they were brand new." I close my eyes, feeling humili- ation heat up my blood. Tighty whities. People posted that they probably belonged to a boy I'd had s.e.x with, that I collected the underwear from boys I slept with, like trophies.

"But why were you dancing for a camera? You should never put stuff like that on video."

My ears burn. "Lexi and I were fooling around. She thought it was hilarious that I was wearing boys' underwear. And while I was shaking my b.u.t.t around, she picked up my phone and taped it.

It wasn't supposed to be seen by everyone in the world." I glare at her. "Especially you," I snap. And then I glance at her face and see hurt in her eyes. She doesn't mean harm; she says out loud what everyone else is thinking. Without the malice.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean that." I reach over, touch her shoulder, and steal a Cheezie from her bag.

"I know," she says quietly. "You didn't even know my name until a couple of weeks ago, even though we worked side by side all summer." She raises her eyebrows but doesn't look at me. Adam is watching me though. I can see him from the corner of my eye.

"Well, I learned it sucks- to have something go viral online,"

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1 6 t h i n g s i t h o u g h t w e r e t r u e I say. The car is quiet and the crunching of the whole Cheezie I shoved in my mouth is overly loud in my head.

"Well," Amy says after a minute, "at least you're not a terrible dancer. And it was kind of funny."

I close my eyes to black out images of me thrusting my pelvis at the camera in boys' underwear. With fake junk. I'm such a freak.

Man. I glance out my side window. Canadian cows are cl.u.s.tered in a herd by the fence that runs parallel to the highway. I'd like to go out and stand in the middle of them. Disappear. I think of a great tweet and reach for my phone.

Removing something from online is like trying to take pee out of a pool.

"At first I thought you must be an attention freak," Amy is saying.

"But since we've become friends..." She glances over and then back to the road, as if she's waiting for me to say something. Which I should. But I don't. Her words burrow into my skin like a tick crawling in to suck at my blood, steal from my life source.

"Well, that's not who you seem to be at all." She stares at the road. "Or are you one of those closet exhibitionists?"

"That thing ruined my life!" The shame in me flares and I fight to extinguish it.

"Ruined your life?" She clucks her tongue. "I'll give you humili- ating, but ruining your life? No way. There are worse things."

I'm kind of shocked she can act like it's not one of the worst things ever.

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J a n e t G u r t l e r "Do you have any idea how many people saw that video?" I demand.

"Over three million, I think," Amy says as she takes out a Cheezie and bites the end off it. "Last time I looked. Completely viral. But it slowed down, right? Those things don't last."

"Like you're the expert on humiliation?"

"Well, you shouldn't have posted it," she says and nibbles on her Cheezie.

"She didn't," Adam says. I glance at him and then down at my hands.

"It was my friend," I say and turn my head to stare out the window. "Lexi. She slept over that night."

"Your friend?" Amy says. She smacks the steering wheel with her hand. "That's mean. Really, really mean."

"She posted it online. And for whatever reason, it caught on. It went out of control." I bite my lip, lower my eyes, forget the other part. "She doesn't even talk to me anymore. Lexi."

"She won't talk to you?" Amy yells, straightening her back and sitting up high on her cus.h.i.+on. "That sounds like a good thing,"

she says. "That's a horrible thing to do to your friend. To anyone."

"See?" I say. "I told you it was horrible."

"Embarra.s.sing. Horrible is men who walk into schools and shoot innocent children and the teachers trying to protect them," Amy says.

"Horrible is the number of homeless people on the streets and mental illness as something we turn away from instead of trying to treat," Adam adds.

"Cancer is horrible," Amy says.

"Okay. Fine. I get it. My embarra.s.sment wasn't life threatening.

But it was...embarra.s.sing."

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1 6 t h i n g s i t h o u g h t w e r e t r u e "I'll give you that," Amy says.

"Thank you," I respond with as much sarcasm as possible and ignore a niggle that these two deserve the total truth.

A semitruck races up on Amy's side and pa.s.ses us.

"Hey," Adam calls out. "You didn't arm pump the trucker."

I ignore him, staring out at the green hills that look like they stretch out for miles in front of us, wis.h.i.+ng I could go back to that night and change it, knowing it will never go away.