Page 33 of Resistance Training
I’m going to tell him I won’t go out with him.
May 18, 2017 at 8:15 p.m.
VIVIAN
Okay, I had a long talk with my sister and she made some very good points. It’s not a great idea for me to back out on prom with Brad Turner, so I should go with him. But I promise I won’t enjoy it. Can we please talk about this before school tomorrow?
BRAD
No. I have to turn in my Independent Study project and I’ll be working on it in the morning. Not everyone cares more about their social life than anything else.
May 19 at 7:37 p.m.
VIVIAN
I’m outside your house. I can see that your parents aren’t home. Can we talk?
Okay, now I’m starting to feel like a stalker, but I get that you don’t want to talk to me face-to-face because I’m so unbearably charming and you want to stay mad at me…
VIVIAN
So that’s it? You’re going to stay mad at me forever and pretend we were never friends because of this one thing?
Fine. I can be stubborn too.
BRAD
It’s not this one thing, Vivian. This is the only thing. I’ve been waiting for you to catch up, but I’m tired of waiting.
VIVIAN
I’m so sorry I hurt you, but I think you’re being irrational and this is really unfair.
BRAD
Yeah. It is unfair. Just let me go.
CHAPTER 9
BRAD
Okay, now that I’m reading through the texts, I can see that it definitely read like she was sending mixed messages and also that I never really told her how I felt about her.
But I always hung out with her. I helped her with her AP Calculus, and I hated AP Calculus. I read whatever book she asked me to. I listened to whatever music she wanted to listen to most of the time, and I only complained about it when it was genuinely terrible. I read the entirety ofTwilightfor her. No guy would do that for a girl unless he was in love with her.
We were going to hang out at my place for senior prom like we did whenever there was a school event, but then she asked me to readTwilightand it was right before tickets went on sale for prom and Edward took Bella to prom, and I was like,Yeah, this is how I’ve felt about her all along and she must know it. It’s like I’ve been fighting my insane attraction to the scent of her blood or whatever and this is her way of telling me she doesn’t want me to resist her anymore, she wants to become a nerd like me and she wants us to go to prom. Together.
So I spent hours trying to figure out how to get my hair to stand up like Robert Pattinson’s. I sprayed silver sparkles all over my face, and I didn’t have time to get amber-colored contact lenses but I fucking looked up how to get them—that’s how much it mattered to me. I frowned all the time, but I practiced looking broody. I practiced a slow-motion swoony walk. And then I went to meet up with her on the way to school, like always, with sparkles on my face and mousse in my hair.
She was waiting for me on the corner like always, looking kind of nervous. I handed her a red apple instead of a rose, and I said to her, “I want to take you to the prom, because I don’t want you to miss anything.” Which was kind of a quote fromTwilight. And I asked her if she’d go to prom with me and she looked up at me with tears in her eyes. I thought she was going to say yes, that this was exactly what she was hoping for. Except she said softly, “Oh shit, Bradley…” And then the other Brad, my fucking nemesis, was walking down the sidewalk toward us with his dickhead friends and they were all laughing and he was like, “The fuck is this, Sparkle Fatty? She’s going to prom withme.”
I looked at her, and she just whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Other Brad grabbed her hand and pulled her off toward school, she dropped the red apple, and I took the long way to class. I laid low at school for the rest of the day and managed to evade Vivian, Brad Turner, and all of his dickhead friends.
It wasn’t just about prom.
It was never just about prom.
