“It’s not so bad.”
“Oh my God, what happened to your face?” Grayson said, joining us.
Nat sighed.
“I bit my lip when I fell down,” I said. I wanted to put my hand in front of my mouth. “Low blood sugar is not sweet.” I wagged my eyebrows.
“What?” Grayson said.
“Sweet. Sugar?” I said.
“You shouldn’t try to be funny,” Grayson said. “It’s not really your thing.” He put his hands in the pockets of his skinny jeans and sort of posed.
“Leave him alone,” Nat said.
“Oh wow, that looks super-painful.”
I turned. Oh, hurray. Lindsey and Rhonda were here now, too. It was the complete rainbow set except for Alec, but he hadn’t been much for completing this particular set lately.
“It doesn’t really hurt.” Much.
“You should tell people you got into a bar brawl,” Grayson said.
“Except lots of people saw me face-plant right over there,” I said, pointing.
Grayson looked. “Do you think anyone got it on video? We could make a gif. You could be a meme.”
Oh God. Was that possible? Of course it was. I groaned.
“Stop talking, Grayson,” Lindsey said.
“What?” Grayson said.
The bell saved me from more humiliation, and we broke up for our homerooms, Rhonda and Nat walking with me. We took our seats, and I noticed a few stares right away. God, I hated that. I ducked my head down a bit, pretending to be really engrossed in whatever I’d written in my notes yesterday. I hated it when people stared. I’d had a lifetime supply of that already.
Mr. Jones took attendance, and then the announcements came on. I listened with only half an ear—I so didn’t care about the last rally game of the season—and then glanced out the window at the field. Only instead of looking out the window, I noticed Malik King was watching me.
I glanced down again. Yep, those notes were super interesting. Certainly as interesting as Malik’s brown eyes. And way more interesting than the way he could crook his right eyebrow up like he’d done. Maybe he was looking past me, at someone behind me. I looked up again.
Nope, his eyes were still on me. He repeated his little eyebrow-rise thing. The smile was gone, though. Instead of friendly, he was looking at me like maybe I was about to faint again or something. God, he was cute.
Not for the first time, I wished I had instincts. There’s a reason I’m a planner. My bullet journal might be totally nerdy, but when stuff happens and I’m not ready for it, I have no idea what to do. Like, say, when the cutest boy in the freaking class is looking at you and doing the eyebrow thing? There’s a response that doesn’t make you look like a complete moron.
People with instincts know what that response is.
People who plan? We do not.
I nodded at him and tried to smile in a way that said, “Hey, look at me, I have instincts and they are good.”
He frowned.
I flashed him an okay sign. That, at least, wasn’t open to interpretation.
He nodded once, and then Jacob said something to him. Malik turned his attention behind him.
Not even first period, and I was pretty sure today was going to be a Freak day.
Fantastic.
* * *
“Did you see Colenap?”
I’d had years of practice at not reacting to that word, and even then I had to work at it to just keep walking. I’d made it through first period and had thought maybe I’d be in the clear, but nope. Right there, between my first and second class, bam. Colenap.
Shit.
I didn’t know who said it. It sounded like one of the guys, of course, but I didn’t turn to find out. I went into Biology like everything was fine.
It wasn’t.
Thing is? I knew it wasn’t personal. If anyone else had passed out in the hallway, I know it would have been gossip, too. I’m not dumb. I knew people were gonna talk about it, and I’d done my best to prepare for today. I had my plan. Anyone who asked? They’d get the carefully prepared discussion of the dangers of low blood sugar in the teenage male I’d given Grayson, complete with the perfectly hilarious punchline, thankyouverymuch.
But the problem was I wasn’t anyone else.
I was Colenap. It’s a portmanteau, and it wasn’t even a smart one. “Kidnap” plus “Cole” equals “Colenap.” Get it? Hi-larious.
Who was Colenap? Colenap was the kid who’d gotten snatched from his house when he was four. Colenap was the kid Old Mrs. Easton had taken. Colenap had been gone from his house for half a day. Who knew what that old lady had done with Colenap for those hours?
No one. No one did. Not even Colenap himself.
The cops had found me when a neighbor had spotted me lying in her backyard with her many, many cats. It had been a big freaking deal. The neighbor had thought I was dead.
I wasn’t. I mean, obviously. What with the being alive now.
But a thing like that? It doesn’t go away.
Old Mrs. Easton had sworn her innocence to her last breath. She said she hadn’t taken me, and she denied locking me in her backyard with her cats. Never mind she lived on the other side of town, or that there was no way I could have gotten into her backyard-cum-cat-shelter. Even running I couldn’t have gotten that far, and definitely not barefoot. That had been a big deal: my feet were clean. But it wasn’t just the lack of dirt. The doctors hadn’t found any other signs of abuse, either. In the end, Old Mrs. Easton didn’t even go to jail.
Which was more than I could say.
Okay, so maybe I’m being a bit dramatic. I mean, “jail” is pushing it. But my parents? They flipped. I wasn’t allowed out of their sight for years. I didn’t get to go to so much as a friend’s birthday party after sundown. I was the first kid among my friends to get a phone, which sounds great except they gave it to me so I could tell them where I was at all times. I’d sat through more lectures about Stranger Danger by the time I was six than I could count.
My parents and I didn’t argue much, but when we did fight it was almost always about me wanting to go somewhere. If they could keep me on a tether until I turned eighteen, they would.
I mean, I guess I get it. Someone took their kid. That’s gotta be frightening. But I was fine. Four-year-old me had no clue. I mean, I was upset, sure, and I freaked out and cried once the cops showed up with my parents and stuff, but honestly? If Mrs. Easton hurt me or did anything to me, I don’t remember. And the doctor that looked me over came to the same conclusion. If she’d intended on doing something with me, she hadn’t done it. The only thing they could really prove she’d done was leave me locked up and unsupervised in her backyard to have a nap with her cats.
I didn’t even get a sunburn.
I barely remember it. As far as I’m concerned, the worst part is the nickname. Because adults talk, kids listen, and that’s how I got saddled with “Colenap.” Walking bags of idiot meat like Austin loved to remind me not to wander off in case some crazy old cat lady took a liking to me. He was the one who’d come up with the word back in elementary school. Calling me Colenap was a great way to make me miserable and make almost everyone else laugh. Now it’s more like an unwelcome nickname. No one laughs, but people use it. Well, Austin laughs, but Austin’s taste in humor hasn’t evolved much since grade school, let me tell you.
The last few months, I don’t think I’d heard “Colenap” even once. I thought maybe, finally, it was done. I’d just keep my head down, try not to get anyone’s attention, and honestly it seemed to be working. Down to literally days left in this school, and no one cared to remember me at all. That was fine by me.
Until now.
Because I passed out.
Because I teleported, and then passed out.
Colenap was back on the radar.
Mrs. Salisbury started talking, and everyone settled down. I stared straight ahead and tried to listen.
I told myself it didn’t matter.
I should just let it go. Like every adult in my life had told me, I could choose not to let what other people thought bother me. I had two weeks left, plus exams. Once they were done, I’d never have to be in this room again.
No matter how many times I said that crap to myself, it didn’t matter. How do you let go being considered a freak? There’s no letting that go. Not when you’ve got people like Austin willing to remind everyone. Not when one face-plant in a hallway is enough to resurrect interest in the school freak.
I fingerspelled the word. Freak.
Head down. Grades up. Graduate. Leave. I’d made it this far. I could do another couple of weeks.
When I got out of town and made it to university, “Colenap” was going to be a thing of the past no matter what it took.
* * *
I grabbed my lunch—and my phone—and headed off for the field behind the track. The last thing I wanted was company, but it wasn’t possible to be alone indoors at school. Well, it was, but only in an “alone in a crowded room” kind of way. Still, the field behind the track was a pretty close second, with a row of large trees where small groups of friends gathered most nice weather days to eat. I was quick enough to claim a tree of my own, sat back against it, and exhaled. You couldn’t see me from the bleachers, which was the goal.
“Hiding?”
I jumped. For a loud guy, Grayson could be quiet when he wanted to. He grinned at me.
“Not hiding, exactly,” I said. “More like wallowing. But you can join my pity party if you want.”
Grayson sat beside me. He had a giant container of pasta. How he was so little blew my mind. I’m not tall, and I didn’t get my dad’s shoulders, but beside Grayson, I didn’t feel quite so tiny. He popped the lid, swallowed a forkful, and leaned over, bumping my shoulder with his.
“Why wallowing?”
“You want the list alphabetically or chronologically?”
“A is for assholes? B is for blood sugar?”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled. Grayson was an idiot and had zero filters, but he could always make me smile. When I didn’t want to punch him. “And C is for Colenap. I got Colenapped again today.”
Grayson winced. He’d recently bleached and dyed a really dark purple streak into his black hair, and he’d pierced his ear again, which I think meant he now had a half dozen rings in his ear. I kept meaning to count, but Grayson never sat still long enough.
“Sorry. That really sucks,” he said finally. He seemed honestly sympathetic. Grayson was hard to read. He moved all the time, but it didn’t always feel honest. My dad had taught me a lot about body language and nonverbal stuff, but Grayson muddied the waters. I was pretty sure he did it on purpose.
I shrugged and took a bite of my sandwich. The lettuce crunched, and I was pretty sure I had real mayonnaise and tandoori chicken. My dad made the best sandwiches.
“You seem more out of it than usual,” Grayson said, pausing to swallow. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Grayson had no idea how right he was about that. Not dwelling on Colenap was one thing. Not dwelling on maybe losing my mind or maybe teleporting was another. “Out of it” was as good a descriptor for deep, deep denial as anything else. “I guess.” I took another bite.
“Who Colenapped you? Was it Austin?”
I looked at him. Grayson had a tight look on his face, and he was stabbing his fork into his pasta like it needed to be punished.
“Did he say something to you?” I asked instead, worried.
“Oh, he’s not that dumb,” Grayson said. “Well, no, he’s a fucking idiot, but he learned after last time. He just stares. Or he ‘bumps’ into me. Always says sorry, but, y’know.”
I did know. Austin got suspended last year for a week for dumping a cup of pop down Grayson’s back. He tried to play the accident card, but between zero tolerance and bad luck on his part—Mr. Jones had seen it happen—his so-called defense was tossed out the window. Ergo, suspended. Austin hadn’t done anything obvious since then. Instead, he’d gotten subtle. Well, as subtle as Austin could be. Especially with Grayson.
Part of that? Grayson stood out, and not just because of the earrings and the hair, either. He seemed to do it on purpose, despite how much negative attention he sometimes got. That day Austin got suspended, Grayson had come to school in his “Real Men Kiss Men” T-shirt. It hadn’t gone over well with quite a few of Austin’s crowd, but only Austin had been dumb enough to go too far.
Sometimes I wondered if Grayson was only being true to himself, or if he really just wanted to pick a fight.
“You want to tell Nat?” I said.
“Do you?” Grayson said. “You’re sure you just fell down?”
Ah. There it was. The reason he’d tracked me down.
“It wasn’t Austin,” I said. “Not today and not yesterday. I really did just pass out.”
He stabbed some more pasta. Then he sighed. “Two weeks.”
The countdown mantra to the end of the year. I held out my fist. He bumped it.
We ate in silence for a bit.
“It’s just…it’d be so him, y’know? Trip you up,” he said. “You’re sure it wasn’t Austin?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Let it go, Elsa.”
He grunted. “Too bad. I would love to have him kicked out just before graduation. Maybe he’d have to re-do a whole year.”
I grinned. “You’re vindictive. I like that about you.”
“I’m down with vengeance. It’s my best quality.”
“No way. Your best quality is your optimism and faith in humanity.”
He laughed so suddenly he choked on his lunch. The other kids at the other trees stared as I whacked him on the back until he coughed up some pasta.
Okay. So high school wasn’t entirely bad. Maybe I’d miss a few things.
“Jerk,” he said, once he recovered. “I keep telling you, don’t do jokes. Not your thing.”
I finished my sandwich and looked across the track. Someone was standing there, looking right at us. Not a student, an adult. He had a beard, and he was wearing a suit. I didn’t recognize him, which was weird.
My stomach clenched, an old and entirely unwelcome reflex I wished I didn’t have. Stranger Danger. Some days I wondered if I’d ever recover from a knee-jerk reaction to spotting someone who didn’t maybe belong where they were. It was stupid. I was totally safe. Heck, Grayson and I were surrounded by students at every one of the trees along the field, but some rando staring in my direction across a field?
It gave me the squicks.
“Who’s that?” I said, giving in to the feeling.
Grayson glanced up and looked where I was looking.
“I don’t know. A sub, maybe?”
The man turned and walked back toward the school.
My heartbeat returned to normal the moment he’d turned his back on us. I took a couple of deep breaths.
“You okay?” Grayson said.
“No,” I said, shrugging. “Of course not. Have you met me? I’m a complete freak.”
“No more than any of the rest of us,” he said, going back to his pasta. It might have been meant as a joke, but I heard the feeling beneath it. Grayson was a good guy. An annoying, loud, incredibly frustrating good guy, but a good guy despite it all. And maybe he’d nearly ruined almost everything when he’d decided Alec was the one, but…
But really? He was just like the rest of us. Looking at him now, it might have been the way the sun was showing off the purple streak in his hair, or it might have been the way he was stabbing at his food, but it occurred to me maybe the person Grayson wanted to pick a fight with was himself.
You’re worth love, I thought. A shiver spread across my skin. I rubbed the goosebumps off my arms.
He frowned, glancing over at me. “What?” he said.
“Just thinking.”
“On second thought? I take it back,” he said, but unless I was mistaken, Grayson was blushing. “You make lists. You like studying. You ac
tually know what you want to do with your life. I think you’re sort of the biggest freak of all of us, y’know?”
I laughed and went back to eating. I glanced up a few more times before the bell rang, but the man didn’t return. Grayson was probably right. Just a sub.
So why did I feel so anxious?
Four
After school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Rainbow Club met in the music room, and as Nat read us the minutes since the last meeting, I was once again reminded if it wasn’t for Nat, we’d never accomplish much of anything. In fact, we’d probably still be debating what to call the club had they not organized pretty much everything. I listened as Nat went over the details of the campaign to get a tampon dispenser in all the bathrooms, telling us we should all be behind it as queers given that women were often the target of misogyny. Their causes were our causes, as toxic masculinity was behind homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.
There were days I felt like I’d never manage to catch up to Nat’s level of woke. Those days ended in Y.
Nat looked up. “Anything else from last week you think we should add?”
Grayson shook his head. “You’re a machine.”
Nat’s little smile was the only sign they’d been complimented. They were like that. They got stuff done, and it made them feel good.
“When I grow up, I want to have half your drive,” I said.
This time, Nat actually blushed and fiddled with their bow tie.
“What’s next? I mean, after tampons,” Lindsey said.
“There’s a phrase I hadn’t expected to hear…ever,” Grayson said.
“I’m not sure we should really start anything new from a formal campaign point of view,” Nat said. “Exams in two weeks, and then we’re done for summer. So, the only thing left is the end-of-the-year party.” They grinned, knowing full well we’d all wanted to talk about the party since we got there. “It’s our club’s turn to host, and we’ve booked a day. Right after exams. So we’ve got about a month to get the venue lined up. Any thoughts?”
“All of the thoughts,” Lindsey said, coming to life. She was the most social and outgoing of the whole group. “Head into the city?” She sounded hopeful. “Dance our asses off?”
Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks Page 3