Also, not to be completely embarrassing, but Yasmine and I want to send big props to our mini CEO in the making, Priya Patel. Summer Term was her brainchild, and this year she’ll be taking what we hope will be one of many steps in carrying out her beautiful mother’s legacy alongside her stepfather, our prince and financial wizard, Ben Grissom. (Yasmine is leaning over my shoulder telling me to stop before I get overly emotional, so I will leave it at that. But we are so proud of you, kiddo!)
Welcome to the GRETA Fund family, ladies. You pumped? GET PUMPED!
XO, Anushka & Yasmine
I lean back against the rough bark. India was all Priya and I talked about last spring. But now . . . I shovel in a few bites. I should write them back and tell them I’m not going.
Then again.
The thought makes me stop chewing. Priya would have to face me if I went.
I set the tin aside. No. What if I scared her away? That would be going too far. Not that I think she’d give up so easily.
Sita brought Priya to India only once, when she was little. Years later, Priya still clung to the faded memory—walking with her older cousins along Juhu beach, snacking on chaat and trying to take it all in. There was a time when Priya was excited to show me India herself. She said I wouldn’t believe the sweltering summers, the crowds, the colors. I know she was itching to go back.
Anyway, this trip is Priya’s baby. She thought it up. Pitched it. Fought for it. Hell, I was there—literally, right beside her on the couch as she made her case via Skype at the monthly GRETA board meeting.
I remember thinking my best friend was kind of a badass that day.
Ben had been particularly skeptical, but I knew she’d wear him down. “Is this even what your mom would have wanted?” he asked from his own computer. We were maybe ten feet apart from him and Priya gave him a WTF? look from across the living room.
“What?” he said. “I’m just saying. Do-gooder volunteer trips abroad? I can see kids using it as a photo op. Or, I don’t know, a quick résumé builder for college applications. Is that who we want to be?”
Yaz and Anushka frowned into their shared screen, and Priya sat up tall. “Look. I hear what you’re saying, but I think we can make this a big enough commitment that people don’t treat it that way. And why not let people use their privilege for good? We could be fostering the next generation of people like my mom.” I could tell Yaz and Anushka were intrigued, judging by their growing smiles.
I gave Priya a nudge. She had this in the bag.
She shot me a smile and returned her focus to the screen. “From a practical standpoint, this would help us get grants from larger organizations that might not otherwise notice us. Suddenly we’re not just a dwindling fund. We’re a multifaceted nonprofit, creating opportunities for cultural exchange.”
“Our girl has a point, Ben,” said Yaz into the camera as Anushka nodded along. “We’ve been spreading ourselves thin—taking on more schools than ever before. Qualifying for new grants could certainly help.”
When their conference ended, I stayed for dinner, and afterward we did homework in the attic. I rarely brought up Priya’s mom. It was a kind of loss I couldn’t possibly understand, and I never wanted to cause her pain. But that night I thought she should hear it. “Your mom would be really proud of you, Pri.” I looked up from my page and she bumped me with her body—a silent Thanks. Then she went back to her textbook.
I find GRETA in my contacts and hit the button, ripping out grass as the phone rings and rings. Tempted as I am to stir up drama with a mass reply, it’s clear she doesn’t want me there. And this is hers. I’ll tell them I can’t go. It’s not a good time. I can’t raise the money. They might know I’m lying. The GRETA ladies are practically aunts to Priya. They probably know her side of things.
“Zan?” says a happy voice that must be Anushka’s. “That you, sweetheart?”
“Oh,” I stammer. “Anushka, hi.”
“We’ve been sprucing up the office. The new phones have caller ID.”
“Nice,” I say. “How’s, uh, how’s everything?”
“Oh, you know us. The job never stops. Did you see my email? Got some fund-raising ideas already?”
“Oh, uh. No, not exactly.”
She tsks into the phone. “How’s life apart? Are you and Priya surviving?”
“Well . . .” So she doesn’t know. “It’s been . . . strange.”
“I can imagine. You poor things. There’s no one quite like a best friend. Yasmine here is giving me a look, but it’s no secret I’m her everything.” I hear murmuring in the background. “Watch your mouth, Yaz. We both know you don’t mean that.” Her chuckle turns to a listless sigh. “Tell Pri to give us a call, will you? We haven’t talked since she had bacon cupcakes delivered to the office for my birthday. They were somehow both disgusting and delicious and she was incredibly pleased with herself.”
I laugh under my breath. “Sounds about right.”
“Listen, dear, we’re actually about to jump on a call with Ben. Was there something you needed?”
I sniff and straighten up. “You know, it can wait.”
When we say goodbye, I have to pull myself together. Inhale, exhale . . . More and more, the stinging eyes and heavy chest come uninvited, out of my control. I guess some part of me hoped Anushka might know. Might slip and tell me everything. Or at least give me a hint.
My phone vibrates with a text and I wipe my eyes with the sleeve of my hoodie. It’s Samantha.
Out sick with cramps from HELL. Annnnnd I wasn’t the only one to bail so we have no servers. AHHH! I know it’s your day off but please say you can sub when you’re out of school?
I start to reply when I notice the clock and look up. The hill has mostly cleared out, a few stragglers hurrying inside. “Crap,” I mutter. I must have missed the bell. I grab my stuff, dust off my shorts, and bring my trash to the boxy bin by the school entrance. I check my schedule and groan. Even if I hoof it, there’s no way I can get to the other end of the building in time.
I hear scuffling behind me and turn around. In the distance, a tall boy trails a much smaller woman on the gravel path. It appears she’s straining to drag him by the arm with both hands, like a sack of potatoes over the shoulder.
“Jesus Christ, Bonnie. Would you let go of me? I’m not a little kid.”
“Well, you act like one sometimes,” says the woman.
“So I took a long lunch. Can we please talk for one second?”
“Nope.” She harrumphs and resumes pulling, though it’s clear he’s letting her. “I didn’t go to all this trouble getting you here so you could sit on my couch and watch Judge Judy all day.”
As they draw closer, I realize that it’s him—the lanky blond kid from Spanish class. He didn’t come back yesterday. I was actually a little disappointed he’d switched out.
“Don’t you have a job you should be at right now?” he asks. They stop a moment and he pulls himself gently from her grip. “Look,” he says. “I can’t figure out how, but people know.”
“How could they . . .” After a pause, she says, “You know what, who cares what people think? Screw people!”
The woman reaches for his arm again, but he shrugs her off. “I’m going, all right?”
I can’t seem to stop listening to them, but they’re getting close, and before I can even explain it to myself, I’m wedged into the space between the wall and the garbage—which, unfortunately for me, is smelling pretty rank in the hot sun.
The walking has stopped.
“It’s just . . . All this high school stuff . . . None of it matters,” says the boy.
“Well, good thing you can graduate this year and be done with it forever, then.”
They’re only a few feet away, and it sounds like I’m right there with them. I hold my T-shirt above my nose to block the smell and try not to make a sound against the scratchy gravel. “You’ll be fine,” says the woman. “It’s a brand-new year. I’m going to leave now.”
“Super,” says the boy.
“Will you at least try? Please?”
He sighs. “All right.”
“That’s my good boy. I’ll see you at home.”
“Yep.” After a moment he calls after her, “Now go back to work, you stalker!”
“I will!” she calls out, her laughter trailing off. “But know that I have eyes everywhere.”
I hear footsteps pass by, then the door to the school opens.
I wait for it to close, but it doesn’t.
Instead I hear his voice overhead. “Hola, trash girl. You can come out now. You wouldn’t want to be late.”
Standing before Señora O’Connell’s class, I find myself momentarily frozen—the second latecomer of the afternoon.
“Ustedes llegan tarde,” says our teacher: You’re late. I cross my arms, uncross them. They’re limp, and long. Where do I normally put these things?
Because life is excessively cruel, Lanky Blond Kid did not, in fact, switch out of my Spanish class, which means—FUNNY STORY—we were headed for the same place. After I sheepishly stepped out from my spy perch–slash–garbage can, he held the door for me. As I grazed by, I think I managed a quiet “Thank you” to the ground before bending down to tie my already-tied shoe. Once he was a safe distance ahead I walked slowly behind, waiting for him to peel off. But he never peeled. So I just sort of weirdly followed. Very weirdly.
Oh God so weirdly.
Señora O’Connell holds out stapled packets for us both. “You missed the lecture. Pluperfect. It’s a hoot.” In my utter humiliation I refuse to look at the boy. “There’s an explanation at the top if you’re lost,” says la Señora. “And you can work in groups.” I don’t say a word. I just take my packet and scurry to the back of the room.
“We missed you in class yesterday,” I hear as I slide into a desk. At the front of the room, Señora O’Connell has clamped down on the boy’s packet to hold him there another moment. “But I was assured over the phone earlier this afternoon that it won’t happen again.”
“So you’re the rat,” he mutters.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry. I’ll be here from now on. With bells on. Yo te prometo.”
“Le,” she corrects. “And you were supposed to be one of the good ones.” At this, the boy smiles a little. He’s pretty cute. Not that I’m looking. “Well, get to work,” says la Señora, releasing him. “Seriously. ¡Ándale!”
I focus on my worksheet as his footsteps approach. And then, to my horror, the chair beside mine screeches, and an outstretched hand comes into view. “I don’t think we’ve properly met. I’m Logan.”
After a pause, I peek up and say, “Zan,” whilst dying a thousand miserable deaths on the inside. I can’t stop picturing myself climbing out from behind that damned trash can. But his eyes are kind, if a little tired. And forgiving, I think. His palm is soft and cool when I take it, and perhaps a bit electric.
We break apart and he settles in at his desk. I tap a pencil against my page, inexplicably compelled to speak again. “Guess that was kind of weird of me back there, huh?”
“What do you mean?” He rubs his jaw as he scans his worksheet, and I realize he’s having fun with this. “Ohhhh. Oh, right. The spying thing.”
I feel my cheeks go red but push through it. “Was that your mom?”
“Aunt,” he says with a flicker of fondness.
“You’re new,” I say, stating the obvious.
“I am.”
“So.” I clear my throat. (Why am I still talking???) “Did you guys just move here?”
I fill in a couple more blanks. Yo había hablado—I had talked. Tú habías hablado—You had talked.
“Me and my sister,” he says. “We came here to live with my aunt. We were in Indiana before.”
“Oh.” I stop short, afraid to say more. I think of Priya and all the questions people used to ask her about Ben. No one could quite grasp how a single white guy wound up raising her. There was a standard line of questioning. Was she adopted? Half white? A foster kid, maybe? It was as if people felt she owed it to them to make herself easier to place. When the story came out, sympathy and praise inevitably followed. Priya was so brave. And Ben was a such a stand-up guy. She never asked for these opinions or for these reminders that her mother was dead. But people had no freaking sense.
“No one died, if you were wondering.”
I laugh, a little startled. “You’re very direct, aren’t you?”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” he says, staring at his paper again. “Direct would be pointing out how absolutely adorable you find me.”
I jolt upright. “Uh, correction. You are not direct. You are delusional.”
“Says the girl who watched me from a trash can.”
My mouth falls open in mock outrage. “Um, excuse you. I was only watching because you were getting owned by a woman half your size! Let’s be clear about this. I was spying for personal amusement.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” He’s grinning, and it strikes me that I am too.
I hear a grumble and look over to see Eddy Hays perking up from a nap on my other side. “Hey, keep it down over there,” he says grouchily.
“Eduardo,” calls la Señora from the front of the room. “So nice to see you conscious. Perhaps you can join Zan and Logan’s group. Get yourself something other than a zero for the day.”
“Sure, why not?” he says, turning to me. He wiggles his eyebrows. “What are we working on, hot stuff?”
“Pluperfect,” I say. “Like, for example, You had been asleep. And I had preferred it that way.”
The comment doesn’t seem to register. “You know,” he says, “I’m thinking of switching to your gym class. I hear we’re doing ballroom dancing. Let me take you for a spin?”
“Not unless it’s my lifeless corpse,” I tell him.
“You can’t walk away from history, Zan.”
I turn to Logan. “Since he’s obviously intent on bringing this up in front of you, I might as well get ahead of it. Eddy and I played a round of spin the bottle at a bar mitzvah party once. We were children and I puked after.”
“You did not,” says Eddy, a bit wounded.
Without warning, a wave of ache comes over me, but I try not to show it. I can still picture Priya so vividly—the horror rippling across her face as I winced and bravely accepted the kiss from Eddy, cross-legged in the circle among the discarded yarmulkes and shimmering disco lights.
Like the tweens we were, we’d spent a lot of time pondering what kissing would be like. Priya, especially. The girl was always ready to fall in love. But Eddy was not what either of us had in mind.
I can still see us at my house that night as I ferociously gargled mouthwash, Priya watching worriedly from the lip of the tub.
“We need a system moving forward,” she said. “Like a code word for Get me the heck out of this!”
I spat the blue liquid into the sink. “That could work.”
“I propose blueberry,” she said. “I like blueberries.”
“Well, isn’t that kind of a problem?” I started to leave, then doubled back. “What if you really want to bring up blueberries? What if it’s not a blueberry situation?”
“Good point,” said Priya. “We need a neutralizing word.” She thought a moment, to the sounds of my vigorous, second-round brushing. “Rhinoceros,” she said. “If you’re actually talking about blueberries, say rhinoceros.”
“So if I say blueberry by mistake, you want me to casually drop the word rhinoceros into a sentence.”
“Yes,” said Priya, her grin broad and unapologetic. “Yes, I do.”
ACH!!!
I jump back to the moment.
To the classroom.
To stupid Eddy, puckering by my ear. “You know you miss these lips,” he says.
I palm his face and shove.
“All right, all right.” Eddy swats me away. “I’m joining Skye and Ying’s group. You�
�re no fun.”
“Class act, that man,” I say wistfully when he switches seats. “With time you could be fast friends.” Logan laughs, his green eyes crinkling in the corners. It feels like you’ve done something right when eyes like that begin to crinkle.
“So what about you?” asks Logan. “Who are your fast friends at Prewitt High?”
My stomach drops a step. Maybe I shouldn’t care, but I don’t want him knowing I’m a hermit. “Just people. I’m kind of a grazer.”
“O . . . kay,” he says, like I’m oh-so-mysterious. “Any big weekend plans? Parties I should crash?”
I don’t have it in me to make something up, but I try to play it cool. “I’ll probably chill. Keep it low-key. My mom’s girlfriend and my little brother have been getting into home decorating, so maybe I’ll help with some of that.”
For a flickering moment, I can tell he’s stuck on the word girlfriend. It wouldn’t be the first time. But then he says, “That’s cool,” like a code for Hey, so you know, I’m not a wacko bigot. “One of my best friends back home has two moms.”
“Oh,” I say. I appreciate the sentiment, but that’s not quite right. “Actually, Whit’s not one of my parents. Not yet, anyway. I mean I have a dad. He and my mom got divorced when I was a kid. Since, you know, she wasn’t really living her truth or whatever.”
“Huh,” says Logan. “That sounds . . . complicated.”
I shrug. “My mom says life is messier than we want it to be. And that sexuality is a spectrum.”
Logan knits his brow. “Yeah, I don’t think I have a spectrum.”
I lift my chin. “How very heteronormative of you.”
For a moment we’re just smiling. Then he nods to my backpack. “You gonna get that?” I hadn’t noticed, but now that I listen, the inside is buzzing and buzzing. I open the pouch and read through my texts. There’s a whole flood of them from Arturo, and from the number of capital letters he’s using, you’d think the restaurant was undergoing some kind of culinary apocalypse.
Guess Sam didn’t find that sub.
I text back quickly—Ahhhh yes will be there ASAP—and put the phone away before la Señora catches me.
“Everything okay?” asks Logan while he doodles on his page.
If You're Out There Page 3