The Book of Luke by Jenny O'Connell
Luke wasn’t just annoying, apparently he was persistent, as well.
I still had a hard time reconciling everything Josie and Lucy said with the person who was Owen’s best friend. I could see it if they were talking about Ricky Barnett. He’d always been the kind of guy who went out of his way to be annoying, like the time he found a loose bolt behind my chair in algebra class and turned to me and asked, “Wanna screw?” But Luke Preston was nothing like Ricky. Until now.
It didn’t seem possible that Luke could change that much. That I could move away for a few years and return to find an entirely different person. Because the person I remember was nothing like the Luke that Josie and Lucy described or the guy I watched walk down the hallway like he owned Heywood and the rest of us were just lucky to be visiting.
In sixth grade I came home from school one day and noticed something strange in our mailbox. And, from the curved red cardboard keeping the mailbox door from closing, and the imitation lace etched along its edge, I knew exactly what it had to be. It was five days before Valentine’s Day, after all, and Carl Mattingly and I had been talking on the phone every night for weeks, even if he just sat there watching ESPN the whole time. I grabbed the candy-filled heart and the rest of the mail, as well (because, even in my state of utter ecstasy, I knew it was the right thing to do), and ran inside the house. I dropped everything on the kitchen table and tore open the heart-shaped box’s cellophane wrapping, revealing sixteen perfectly plump chocolates. It was so obvious Carl loved me!
“Aren’t you going to open the card?” my mother asked, frowning at me. You never opened a gift before the card, and I knew that.
So I slipped my finger inside the pale pink envelope that had been taped to the top and pulled out its contents. But when I opened the card it wasn’t Carl’s scratchy block writing professing his undying devotion. It was Luke’s name scrawled across the bottom, directly under a picture of Snoopy declaring “Dog gone it, I like you!”. There was no “Love Always” or “Yours Truly” before his name. Not even a “from.” Just Luke’s first name and last initial: Luke P. My first thought was, Luke?
My mom had watched me open the box of chocolates, so there was no hiding it. And there was no getting around what I knew was coming next.
“Aren’t you going to call him and say thank you?” she asked, watching me pick out the pieces I wanted to keep (caramels, dark chocolates, truffles), and then offering her the ones I didn’t want (coffee liqueurs, white chocolates, and peanut clusters).
“I don’t know his number,” I’d told her, hoping she’d take my excuse and let it drop; of course, she didn’t.
“Look in the Heywood directory,” she told me and grabbed the book out of her desk drawer. “It’s got to be in there.”
There were times when the school directory came in handy, like when Lucy and I wanted to call Carl and see if Brian Conroy wanted to go to the movies with us. But now it was no help at all. Now it just meant I’d have to call Luke and act like I was actually appreciative of his chocolates—which I was, I love chocolate. I just didn’t love them from Luke Preston.
With my mother standing there watching me stuff two caramels into my mouth, there was no getting around dialing his number. She handed me the cordless phone. And I dialed.
The thing is, when he answered and I told him it was me, Luke didn’t say anything. Not one single word. There was complete and total silence on his end of the line. What could I do? Sit there and listen to him breathe? I said thank you for the chocolates and waited—for something, a “you’re welcome,” or a “hope you enjoyed them.” But all I got was a single-word response. “Okay.”
And that was it. I never mentioned the Valentine’s chocolates to him again, and he never mentioned them to me. For a few days afterward I almost convinced myself he’d sent them to me by mistake, that his silence upon learning it was me on the phone wasn’t due to an inability to speak, but a result of his complete mortification that he’d sent chocolates to the wrong girl. But in a class of fifty students, I was the only Emily. And he wasn’t that dumb.
I never told Josie or Lucy about my Valentine’s surprise. It was more of a nonevent than anything else. Besides, I still liked Carl Mattingly, and the last thing I needed was Lucy and Josie reading all sorts of meaning into the cardboard heart and Snoopy card, or, worse, asking Luke the question I kept asking myself. Why?
Three years later, when I let Owen feel me up, I assumed Luke knew about it. I mean, they were best friends, after all. But Luke still never mentioned the candy or made a snide remark or made me feel like a slut. He was still just nice—of course, in a different way than I was. Luke didn’t say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me” and know every chapter and verse in Polite Patty’s books by heart. He was nice in the way that someone who always seemed to know how you were feeling or what you were thinking is nice. He was nice enough that you always knew he’d say hi to you and carry on a conversation if you wanted to, but he wasn’t someone you were aware of unless you went out of your way to notice him.
But now it was impossible not to notice Luke, and there he was, acting like he was oblivious to me. No matter how close I stood to him or how long I’d stare at him as he came down the hall, he barely met my gaze. It was like he was purposely trying to drive me crazy just to prove that he could. And he did. By the end of the day I felt like I had to make him look at me.
Luke and Owen and Matt were standing in front of the boys’ locker room door talking, and I was on my way into the gym. But instead of pushing the gym door open, I stopped and turned to face them. I focused my unblinking eyes on Luke, narrowing them until they sent the message I wanted, which was: Don’t screw with me.
I sent mental daggers in his direction, willing him to feel my gaze boring into his head. He’d have to be blind not to see me.
“Em, is something wrong?” Owen finally asked.
I shook my head no.
“You sure? The nurse’s office is that way, remember?” Owen pointed in the opposite direction. “Maybe Nurse Kelly can give you something for that.”
I didn’t know if Owen meant my unattractively flaring nostrils or the tic that I’d suddenly developed in my left eye.
Still, Luke wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence. So I headed to gym class with the beginning of a wicked headache emanating from my left eye.
Luke was testing me while I was testing him, and we were both waiting to see who’d break down first. And all day I made sure it wasn’t me. Except one time, when three junior girls were clustered around Luke vying for attention. He glanced over at me, caught me watching, and almost seemed to smirk. Like he’d won. Which he hadn’t, but I hated that he thought he beat me. And it was even easier to hate him after that.
So is it any wonder I found it practically impossible to reconcile the guy flirting with a group of junior girls with the breathing on the other end of that phone and the messy little signature under Snoopy’s Valentine wishes?
When I passed Lucy in the hall on my way to history class, she tipped her head and signaled for me to meet her by the water fountain. I discreetly turned around and followed her. We both knew it was ridiculous, but for some reason the idea of keeping our plan a secret made it more fun.
“How’s it going?” Lucy asked.
“I’ve got tons of stuff. What about you?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s as if all the girls in our class were just storing up their complaints waiting for me to ask them. It’s crazy.”
“We should get together after school and start going through everything,” I suggested.
“Want to go to your house?” Lucy asked.
Lucy and Josie still didn’t know about my dad, and I wasn’t ready for them to find out.
“TJ will probably be around. Why don’t we just go to Josie’s again. We’ll have more privacy.”
Lucy gave me a knowing nod and turned to leave. I almost expected her to say “ten-four, good buddy,” or “over and out.”
“There’s even more stuff here than I thought there would be.” Lucy flipped through my pages of notes, astounded I could get such good dirt in such a short amount of time. “How are we ever going to come up with a way to explain all of this.”
“I think we need to start by putting them into groups.” I took the notes from Lucy and ran my finger down the lists. “Maybe by annoyance factor or something?”
“Annoyance factor? They’re all annoying.” Josie glanced down at her own lists piled on her lap. “Listen to this: Eileen says a guy shouldn’t hang his arm around your neck so his hand just happens to hang right over your boob—by accident, of course.”
“Mandy hates it when guys start playing the air guitar when it’s obvious they have no idea what the hell they’re doing,” Lucy added. “You never see a girl rip into an impromptu air solo just because she likes a song. And then there are the guys who expect you to kiss them even if they haven’t shaved in days, like it’s no big deal if we end up looking like we’ve exfoliated our chins with sandpaper. They’re too lazy to scrape a razor across eight square inches of facial hair, but we’re supposed to feel like we’re turning into raging lesbians if we forego shaving our legs one morning.”
“Okay,” I conceded. “So the annoyance factor won’t help. How else can we do this?”
“Maybe categorize them in some way?” Lucy suggested. “Like how your mom breaks up her books into things like table manners and correspondence and stuff like that.”
“Let’s try that,” Josie agreed, numbering a blank sheet of paper as she waited to hear what categories made sense. In the end we came up with four sections that addressed various areas of concern: personal habits, communication, things you do in public, and relationships.
“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Lucy glanced up at us. “It’s too bad the class of 2016 gets to benefit from our dismal experiences when there are so many guys who need our help today.”
“Well, we can’t show anyone now. The guys would probably just find a way to remove it from the capsule or something. Remember, they think they’re just fine the way they are.”
“Josie’s right,” I added. “If any of them find out we’re doing this, it will ruin the whole thing.”
Josie frowned. “Although if anyone needs to change, it’s Luke. He’s a walking handbook don’t.”
“Last year he devised the jiggle scale.” Lucy pointed to Josie’s boobs. “You know, so the guys could rate the breast size of Heywood’s female population.”
“Classy guy, right?” Josie shook her head . “I cannot even believe I went out with him.”
“Are guys really so clueless?” Lucy wanted to know. Obviously it was a rhetorical question. Of course they were. “Do they just not know how to act like rational, normal human beings? Are we really expected to put up with their crap?”
Again, rhetorical, but Josie pondered Lucy’s questions. “You know, maybe it’s not enough to just give them a handbook. I mean, look what happened when that class put a Rubik’s Cube in the capsule with instructions. Their directions totally didn’t work at all. Nobody ever figured out how to get all the same colors on one side.”
“So, what? We have to prove the handbook works?”
“Or at least prove that you can change a guy, that there is some hope of getting him to act at least remotely the way you want him to.”
“How are we going to do that if we can’t tell anybody about the handbook in the first place?”
“We have to try it out. We have to follow it page by page and see if we can teach some unsuspecting guy to change his ways,” Josie explained. “And it should be the worst offender of all.”
Lucy and I looked at each other and knew exactly who she was talking about. Luke.
But Lucy wasn’t convinced. “How are we going to do that? He knows you hate him.”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that I should do it.” Josie grinned and turned to me. “I was thinking it should be Emily.”
My mouth dropped open, which must have been quite unattractive considering it was stuffed full of Pop-Tart. “Me? Why me?”
“Because he’d never suspect you. First of all, you’ve been gone so you have no idea what he’s been like since sophomore year.”
I shook my head. “Oh no, two days is more than enough to see what he’s like. And he already knows I can’t stand him.”
“It’s only been two days, Emily. He probably just thinks you’re PMSing or something.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you want me to perform some sort of experiment on Luke Preston?” I repeated, just to make sure I understood. “You want me, personally, all by myself, to rehabilitate him?”
“Exactly. Luke loves attention and he’ll never suspect you have an ulterior motive behind your sudden interest. He’ll just think you find him as irresistible as every other girl—another conquest to add to his long list. But while he’s thinking you’re into him, you’ll really be way too smart to actually fall for his crap,” Josie concluded. “It’s perfect.”
Lucy agreed. “She’s right, you know.”
“But I haven’t said one single nice thing to him since I’ve been back,” I protested. “There’s no way he’d believe I was interested in him.”
“Maybe Emily has a point.” Lucy pushed the lists we’d made aside. “Besides, it is kind of wrong, pretending to like him and then writing an entire book about what a dick he is.”
“Wrong? Do I have to repeat what he did to me?” Josie pointed to my chest. “Would you like to know where you score on the jiggle scale?”
I immediately stopped licking Pop-Tart icing off my fingers. “You know where I score on the jiggle scale?”
Josie threw her hands in the air, exasperated by both of us. “No! That’s not the point.”
I went back to licking my fingers, even though there was a tissue about three feet away on the night table and wiping them off would have been the more proper thing to do. I even considered wiping them on my pants as a sort of emancipation proclamation, but then decided that declaring my freedom from other people’s expectations was one thing—looking like a slob with icing on her thighs was another. “Look, I can’t do it. First of all, he knows I’m your best friend.”
“True.” Josie tapped a pen on her knee as she tried to figure out how to finesse that small crimp in her plan. “Well, you can tell Luke I’m over him.”
Over him. Josie was probably over the reality of being Luke’s girlfriend, but she certainly wasn’t over the idea that Luke could be over her. “You can’t even stand being in the same room as him,” I pointed out.
“Then I’ll just have to try harder,” she decided. “It’s worth it. I know you can do it, just pretend he’s Sean. Take out your revenge on Luke.”
“So, I’d get to be a total bitch to him?”
“No!” Lucy cried. “You can’t be a bitch. You have to be nice.”
Figures. Just when I’m ready to finally stop being nice, I still had to pretend to be nice to be mean. Couldn’t I ever catch a break?
“And what if I don’t feel like it?”
“You have to feel like it, it’s the only way this will work. Besides, you’d only be pretending to be nice. If you’re going to try to teach him all the lessons in the handbook and make sure they work, then he has to actually believe you like him—and he has to like you.”
“Think of Luke as your senior project. And you want to get an A, right?” Josie teased, knowing me all too well. “Then, once the guide’s been tested, we can make any modifications before we actually have to put it in the capsule.”
“Come on, you have until the middle of April to work up to it. If we can do this for Luke, the rest is a piece of cake.”
“What kind?” I wanted to know.
Lucy didn’t even hesitate. “Devil’s food with buttercream icing and chocolate sprinkles.”
She knew that was my favorite.
“If anyone can refor
Josie had hit a nerve and she knew it. Here was my chance to show Sean. Here was my chance to really get even. “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll do it.”
“That’s awesome. Wait, I bought us a little present.” Josie got off the bed and removed something from a shopping bag she’d had on her dresser. “Here, you’ll be needing this,” she said, handing me a plain brown spiral notebook.
“What’s this?” I asked, taking the empty notebook and turning it over. A label read: Made from 100% recycled material.
“That is our new guide.”
“I sort of pictured the guide as some leather-bound journal with a satin ribbon to keep our place,” I told them. “You know, something that looks official.”
“I thought of that, but we don’t want to draw attention to it. This way you can carry it around and nobody will ever suspect anything.” Josie crumpled up the bag and tossed it toward her garbage can. She missed. “It’s where we’ll write down everything we’ve learned and where you can take notes about how you got Luke to change. And now that you have the guide, you need a strategy.”
Lucy picked up the bag, came back to the bed, and made her own attempt at scoring a basket. This time it landed exactly where it was supposed to. “Yeah, you can’t just start telling him how he should act and what he should do. You need to ease into it. Make him realize the right way to act. Think of it like you’re training a dog.”
“Exactly!” Josie exclaimed. “It’s our version of obedience school. You’re training Luke to change.”
Lucy and Josie immediately started giving me a crash course on Luke. If the only way to lure him into this was to play nice, then we needed a plan. A three-step plan, to be exact.
Step one: Gain Luke’s trust. As probably all dog trainers would agree, this was just common sense. You don’t approach a dog and start calling out orders, you offer him your hand, let him sniff around and feel comfortable, and then go to work.