Life by Committee Read Free

growing line of after-school customers who are trying to be polite and calm but are jiggling their legs and sighing.
    Paul doesn’t even uncross his legs, and I want to stand up and help but get momentarily distracted by Alison’s deep frown and new glasses. She’s reading The Fountainhead . I am fascinated by The Fountainhead . I miss having friends who do things like wear uncool glasses and read The Fountainhead . I miss having more than one friend, period.
    â€œPaul? Babe? Backup?” Cate calls out again.
    Paul and I are even bigger assholes, because Cate’s pregnant and it shows. She touches her stomach every few seconds and even puts a hand to her lower back from time to time, as if she is eight months in and not five.
    â€œI’ll go,” Paul says. “You stay right here. Show ’em who’s boss.”
    â€œYou okay to work?” I ask. My dad’s smoking up is no secret. Not to me, not to Cate, and not to the other town stoners. But a lot of people wouldn’t like knowing he is high on the job. Around their kids. Making their soy lattes.
    â€œYeah, yeah,” he says. “You okay by yourself? Those girls aren’t gonna start anything with you, right?”
    â€œPaul,” I say, loving him even now, with his T-shirt fading and old and his hair a hot mess of bed head. “They’re not, like, a gang. Their weapons are basically silence and backstabbing.” He nods. Alison and Jemma snort. They probably heard that, too.
    I don’t mind being at the table alone. The café is my home, and I collaged this table myself when I was ten and too small to know that Peter, Paul, and Mary are not actually cool, even though they are from the sixties or whatever. Pictures and lyrics from them are glued in overlapping enthusiasm, and then laminated. The table is one of my many masterful contributions to the decor,which is all homemade craftiness and ironic kitsch. Heaven. And pretty much the same basic design choices as our actual home, a little house a few miles down the street in the shadow of a mountain.
    Anyway, now that I’m at the table alone, I can turn on my computer and hope to see Joe already online.
    No such luck. Maybe I imagined the whole ecstatic conversation last night. Maybe I’ve imagined every late-night conversation with Joe. I look up old chats, and there they are. Pages and pages of Joe calling me adorable and asking me what I love about used books, and telling me how out of place he feels around the other hockey players sometimes.
    The chats are all there, but in real life, nothing has happened. I get headaches from thinking too hard about what it would be like to kiss him, but it can’t happen while he has a girlfriend. Once in a while our fingers will touch in the middle of a card game, and that accidental touch is so electric, I wonder if I could survive an actual kiss.
    My one and only friend, Elise, is online, and I throw out a hey lady , but she doesn’t respond, so she’s probably actually doing homework. Or she knows I’d be using her as a distraction. Even though we have only been friends since the summer, she sees right through me.
    I don’t love her with the decade-long devotion that I had for Jemma, but she’s kind and effortlessly cool andas smart as my old friends. But we don’t share that special history of hot chocolate stands, snowball fights, pig Latin conversations, chocolate chip cookie baking competitions.
    That said, she has also never told me I am going in the wrong direction as a person, so she wins.
    I keep accidentally looking up and over at Jemma. If Joe were online, I’d be 100 percent distracted and wouldn’t have to wonder what Jemma thinks of my clothes and my hair and the tightness of my black pants today.
    Note: they are tight. But everyone is wearing tight black pants lately. And my ass has grown into a shape that makes every pair of pants look kind of tight. Not a