“Lydia and I are going to teach you how to flirt,” I say, watching her.
She gives a snort of laughter. “Good luck. I’m not sure I’ve ever known how to flirt.”
I shrug, sitting on the edge of my bed, which is directly next to the window. “We’ll figure it out. You’ll be fine. Just smile a lot. Laugh at his jokes.”
She tilts her head to one side. “What if they’re not funny?”
“You can make that call. People usually think he’s funny, though, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”
She just looks at me for a second, and even though she’s not particularly close to me, something about that look makes me nervous. Then, her voice soft, she says, “Did you ever find out what your dad was doing at your house?” She pauses. “I saw the letters on your desk.”
I look at my desk without thinking. The letters are still there, of course, because I haven’t moved them.
“My mom says he wanted to talk to me,” I say absently as I stare at the stack.
“Are you going to open those?” she says.
“No,” I say, looking back to her.
“Then are you going to throw them away?”
I sigh, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. “I keep meaning to. I just…haven’t.”
She pauses, and even from here I can tell she looks nervous. I think she’s steeling herself to say something, so I wait.
“Do you think maybe part of you wants to read them, and that’s why you haven’t thrown them away yet?” she says.
That hits a bit closer than I particularly want to look at. I frown. “I thought we were talking about Jack,” I say.
She pauses for a beat and then says, “We can talk about Jack.” She sits until all I can see of her is her head and her hair. Not a bad view, really.
Stop it, I tell myself.
“Or we can talk about something else,” I say.
“Or we can hang up and go to bed and remember to close our blinds in the future.”
I shrug, grinning at her. “The view isn’t terrible.”
Her eyes widen, and there’s a silence. I imagine her face turning red. “Are you flirting with me?” she says, her voice squeaking.
“What? No,” I say, but even to myself I don’t sound convincing. I shift uncomfortably.
“You are,” she says, jabbing her finger at me. “You’re flirting with me. There’s this sort of smile you do, like a smirk. Stop it!”
I groan and bury my face in one hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. This whole thing has just thrown me off, and…you know. You look good. My instinct is to flirt with you.”
“Well, it’s weird,” she says, but she smiles.
I can’t help a smile, too. “You’re really proud of yourself, aren’t you?” I say.
“Sort of,” she says. “Although it’s really Lydia’s doing. But…I feel pretty. And Lydia was right. That sort of makes me feel a bit more confident.”
“You should feel confident. Flirtation aside, you look nice,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says, her voice soft. “Now go to bed, Cohen.”
I just smile at her and hang up.
Then I go to my desk, take a deep breath, and grab the letters from my dad.
***
I don’t know how Mina is feeling when Monday rolls around, but I find that I’m nervous on her behalf. I can only think that Virginia is going to be rude about it, assuming Mina put her makeover to good use and wore clothes that fit and whatnot.
I don’t even see her until lunch, where I notice that she’s sitting not by herself in the corner but with Lydia. She looks a bit uncomfortable—her smile is a kind of forced, and her voice is probably squeaky—but she doesn’t look like she wants to die or anything. She’s even talking to people, and I’m proud of her.
I had wondered how Mina would do when she was doing her own makeup and hair, but I shouldn’t have worried. She maybe looks a little less fancy than she did on Saturday, but it’s a barely recognizable difference, and she still looks great. Her hair is down, and there’s no baggy clothing in sight.
And people notice.
Part of it is probably that she’s sitting with Lydia, who’s well-liked by pretty much everyone. Lydia and I aren’t part of the same “group,” per se, but our groups intermingle a lot.
I look down my lunch table to where Virginia is seated next to Marie, and I strain my ears to hear what they’re saying. If anyone is talking about Mina, it will be them.
“Ridiculous,” Virginia is saying, her voice particularly snooty.
How did I ever date her? She just seemed different when we were together. Until I really started paying attention to how she treated other people, I guess. She was always nice to me. But we weren’t together for long.
“I don’t know,” says Felicity, who’s nice enough that I hope Virginia doesn’t taint her. “I think she looks pretty.”
“She’s trying too hard,” Virginia says with a sniff. “Wet Willy is just trying to fit in. It’s pathetic. Clothes and hair can’t do anything about her being a loser. And her eyes.” Virginia pretends to shudder, smoothing her hair in a way that’s almost self-conscious.
I swallow my retort and turn to Marcus, who I sat next to on purpose today. I nudge him with my elbow and nod discreetly at Mina. “What do you think about Wet Willy?”
I offer up a prayer of repentance for calling her that.
“What?” he says, looking over at me, his mouth full of food.
“Mina.” I nod at her again. “What do you think of her?”
I watch Marcus as he locates Mina. I watch him look at her. And then I listen to him say something so horrible that I will not repeat it. I actually feel unclean just for hearing it.
I only barely stop my jaw from dropping. “What?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says with a leer on his face; apparently he thinks I was carrying on the conversation. “I always saw potential in her.” Then he starts shoveling food in his mouth again, and I look away. Hearing him say that about Mina makes me feel faintly ill. Imagining him saying something like that about Lydia makes me want to hit him.
“You’re disgusting, man,” I say.
Marcus’s eyes darken and narrow as he looks at me. “Shut up, ugly.”
I get up instead of answering. I don’t want to do or say anything stupid.
Our cafeteria is large, with white cinder-block walls and scuff-marked white-and-red floors. Even though I could use the huge trash can a few feet away from my table, I walk all the way to the other side of the cafeteria and use that one instead, throwing away my half-eaten lunch. Talking to Marcus has robbed me of my appetite. I’ll probably regret not finishing it later at football practice, but right now I don’t care.
I pass Lydia and Mina at their table, and I nod to them, but Mina’s not paying attention. She’s looking at my table instead—at Jack, who’s smiling at her.
Operation Jack looks to be going well, then. I feel a weird twinge in the pit of my stomach—maybe I should eat after all.
I keep walking, making my way to the water fountain just to have something to do, when my phone buzzes. It’s a text from Mina.
Am I allowed to be seen talking to you at school, oh popular one? it says.
I smile. I’m at the water fountain by the elevator.
By the time I’ve finished getting a drink, Mina shows up, looking nervous.
“So?” she says. “Are people saying anything? Or is everyone ignoring me?” Her voice sounds hopeful.
“Not ignoring you,” I say, my hands in my pockets. “Sorry.”
She crosses her arms and bites her lower lip. “What are they saying? Are they being mean?”
I hesitate. “I talked to Marcus.”
“Ew,” she says. “I don’t want to know. Anyone else?”
I shrug. “Just what you’d expect from other people. Virginia says you’re trying too hard—” I stop. “Do you really want to know this stuff?”
She sighs, running
her fingers through her hair. “Probably not,” she says finally. “Sorry I asked.”
“Felicity thinks you look pretty,” I say with another shrug. “And what Marcus said was technically positive? I guess? Just…very crude.”
“Ew,” she says again.
I grin. “That about sums Marcus up.”
Mina sighs. “Lydia is being so nice to me, and I feel bad because I’m not doing anything for her.”
“Lydia enjoys being nice, and she likes you. Don’t worry about it.”
Mina looks unconvinced, but she nods. “Well, thanks. I just wanted—yeah. I just wanted to know.”
The bell rings loudly overhead, and the cafeteria erupts into noise.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I say, hoisting my bag up further over my shoulder.
She gives a little wave and walks away.
13
Cohen
People stop talking about Mina within a few days, to my relief, and October rolls in. October is one of my favorite months. The trees are pretty—although I would never admit to my friends that I think so—and the air is crisp. My yard is dusted with the leaves of the tree at the corner of our yard. When I was a kid my dad used to rake all the leaves into a pile and then let us jump in them.
Times change. I push my father’s letters firmly out of my mind and go about my business. I need to shower before Mina gets here. I stink from football practice.
It’s Saturday, and she’s coming over to tutor me again. She says we’re going to start with English. She’s asked me several times what else we’re doing, because I’ve mentioned that I need to see where she needs to most work, but I haven’t told her yet. I don’t know how she feels about corn mazes, and the less time she has to back out, the better.
When I get out of the shower and get dried off, I call her.
“Bring a Halloween costume,” I say, and I already know what her response will be.
“Oh, no,” she says immediately—and predictably. “No. Not happening.”
“If you don’t bring one of your own, you’ll have to wear one of Lydia’s,” I say, toweling my hair dry. “It will probably show more skin than you want it to, and she will almost certainly make you wear heels with it.”
“Nope,” Mina says, and I picture her shaking her head. “I have a line, and this crosses it. I am not going anywhere or doing anything that requires a costume.”
“Mina, what did you make me do last weekend?” I say, trying to sound patient.
Silence.
“All right, I’ll answer. You made me do a practice test. It was horrible. I hated it. But I did it, because you were right—you needed to assess my problem areas. So I trusted you as my tutor, and I did what you asked.”
More silence.
“Do you like Jack?” I say. “Do you want to spend time with him? Do you want to make friends?” I sit on my bed and wait, but there’s just more silence. Then I sigh. “You know, at some point you’re going to have to say something.”
I finally hear her grumbling. “I’ll bring the only costume I own,” she says. “Where are we going?”
“To Decker’s Farm. I’ve never been, but there’s a corn maze. It’s half-off if you wear costumes. You can argue with me about it when you get here.”
She hangs up on me, and I grin. Then I grab my computer and start googling “how to be confident.”
When Mina shows up at my house with a grocery bag in her hand, she looks less than thrilled. She thrusts the plastic bag into my hands as she steps inside.
“I don’t like scary things,” she says.
I give a vague wave of the hand that’s not holding her costume. “I don’t even think it’s scary. What costume did you bring?”
“Like I said, the only costume I own.” She gestures to the bag, and I open it, pulling out a full-length onesie, complete with a hood. It’s black with bones on the front, making it look like a skeleton.
I smile. Somehow it’s so…her. I’m glad she didn’t bring something skimpy; that would have felt weird. She’s not a skimpy kind of person.
“Great,” I say. “Let’s get to the English; we’re leaving about a half-hour before dark.”
“And when you say ‘we,’ you mean…” she says, trailing off as she starts up the stairs.
“You and me,” I say, following her. “But we’re meeting up with some other people there. The point of this is to let you interact with Jack. I can help figure out where your social skills are…less proficient.”
“Right,” she says. “That’s a good idea.”
I frown at her back retreating up the stairs and then down the hall to my room. “Really? Because you fought me pretty hard about it on the phone.”
“I mean, I don’t like it,” she says, her voice reluctant as she waits for me to open my bedroom door. “I’m not big on socializing. But it’s still a good idea. It just makes me nervous.”
When we’re in my room, she pulls a big paperback book on the desk and then sits on the edge of the bed. “Sit,” she says, pointing at the desk chair.
“Still bossy,” I say, but I sit.
She ignores me. “And turn to chapter 5. I looked at your practice test,” she says, and I’m suddenly nervous, “and it looks like what you’re struggling with most is word choice and punctuation.”
I find chapter 5 as I listen to her talk. She speaks easily, like this is something she does every day.
“We’re going to start with punctuation, because it’s something you might just have to memorize. Some people have a knack for it; some people don’t. Which is fine,” she says quickly. “Different people are good at different things. I did the worst on the math section. Math isn’t my thing. Punctuation isn’t yours. Do you have chapter 5 yet?” she says.
“Yeah,” I say, and she comes to stand behind me. She’s wearing the perfume from the purple bottle again; it floats around me distractingly, but I force myself to focus on the book in front of me.
“Okay. So here,” she says, leaning forward over my shoulder and pointing at the first question. “This question wants to know the correct punctuation for this sentence.” Her hair falls in a curtain as she speaks, making it hard to see the page in front of me.
“Sorry,” she says. “Hang on.” She straightens up, and I turn to look at her just in time to see her pulling her hair into a ponytail. “All right. The thing is, people always speak with the correct punctuation, if that makes sense. If you know what different types of punctuation sound like, you can almost always tell what’s right and what’s wrong. Commas, for example, create a slight pause. Periods make a full stop. This long dash—well, it’s called an em dash, but you don’t need to know that—the long dash is sort of like a comma, but it’s a bigger pause. So if you read the answer options aloud, using the correct sounds, you can usually tell what the correct option is. Here, for example. The first option sounds like this: ‘The farmer’”—she paused—“‘milked each cow.’ Is that how you would say it?”
I shake my head. “You wouldn’t pause in there.”
“Right,” she says, nodding. “This comma doesn’t work in here. That option is out.”
“Huh,” I say, leaning back in my chair.
She backs up quickly and sits back on the bed. “Does that make sense?” she says.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “It does, actually.”
“So what you’re going to need to do is get a feel for how these punctuation marks sound. There are more technical rules for all of this, I think, but this is a pretty useful way to do it.”
I swivel around in my chair and smile at her. “You’re really smart,” I say.
She blushes and shrugs.
“I’m serious,” I say. “Hey, where are you applying? For college, I mean.”
Her face turns redder, if that’s possible. “Actually, I’d like—well, maybe it’s dumb. But I sort of just want to be a florist, or an interior designer. Maybe have my own business, kind of like my mom does. I love making things bea
utiful.”
I tilt my head, studying her, running my thumb absently over my scar. “I could see that,” I say. “That’s not dumb.” Then something occurs to me. “Why don’t you work with your mom? She’s a florist.”
Mina sighs. “She doesn’t own a shop or anything. She’s more freelance. And we did think about it, but ultimately I wanted a job working for someone I wasn’t related to. I thought it might look better on any future applications or whatever.”
I nod. “That makes sense. So…school?”
She smiles hesitantly. “There’s a place in Massachusetts that has a really good interior design program, but I don’t know. It’s far away.” She shrugs. “I don’t know yet. And there aren’t really degrees in floristry. You can take classes on floral design, but it’s not generally something you can find a degree about.”
“You should do it,” I say, smiling at her. “The interior design thing. You’re coming out of your shell, remember? You could at least apply. What do you have to lose by applying?”
She shrugs again. “What if I don’t get in?”
“Then you go somewhere else. But at least you try. Not trying is something you regret later,” I say.
She stares at me for a second, an odd look on her face, but it’s gone before I can figure it out. “Maybe I will,” she says. “Now, are you ready to look at a few questions about punctuation?”
Five practice questions later, I’m actually starting to get the hang of it. Semicolons are still of the devil though, so I ask Mina about them.
“Oh, easy,” she says, waving her hand. “If the clause on the left and the clause on the right could both stand on their own as complete sentences, you can use a semicolon. But they should be related. If the one on the left has nothing to do with the one on the right, no semicolon.”
“I can remember that,” I say.
“You can,” she says, nodding.
“Hey,” I say, checking my watch. “You should probably get your costume on.”
“Meh,” she says, and I grin at her as she leaves the room with her costume in hand.
Eye of the Beholder (Stone Springs Book 1) Page 10