by Sarah Dessen
“What’d you do?” he said again, then gestured toward the front desk. “It’s only the first day and you’re already in trouble.”
“I am not,” I said. “My schedule’s messed up.”
“Oh, sure,” he said slowly, faking suspicion. He had on a baseball cap, his blond hair sticking out beneath, and a red T-shirt and jeans. He didn’t have a backpack, just one plain spiral notebook with a pen stuck in the binding. Macon Faulkner was definitely not the school type. “You’ve probably already gotten into a fight and been suspended.”
“No,” I said, and I don’t know if it was just the day I’d had or a sudden wave of Scarlett-like boldness, but I wasn’t nervous talking to him. “I got signed up for all the wrong classes.”
“Sure you did,” he said easily. He settled back against the wall. “Now, you know how to handle yourself in there, right?”
I looked at him. “What?”
“How to handle yourself,” He blinked at me. “Oh, please. You need big help. Okay, listen up. First, admit nothing. That’s the most important rule.”
“I’m not in trouble,” I told him.
“Second,” he said loudly, ignoring me, “try to divert them by mentioning anything about your therapist. For instance, say, ‘My therapist always says I have a problem with authority.’ Act real serious about it. Just the word ‘therapist’ will usually cut you some slack.”
I laughed. “Yeah, right.”
“It’s true. And if that doesn’t work, use the Jedi Mind Trick. But only if you really have to.”
“The what?”
“The Jedi Mind Trick.” He looked at me. “Didn’t you ever see Star Wars?”
I thought back. “Sure I did.”
“The Jedi Mind Trick is when you tell someone what you want them to think, and then they think it. Like, say I’m Mr. Mathers. And I say, ‘Macon, you’re already pushing the limits and it’s only the first day of school. Is this any kind of way to start the year?’ And you’re me. What do you say?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
He rolled his eyes. “You say, ‘Mr. Mathers, you’re going to let this slide, because it’s only the first day, it was an honest mistake, and the fire got put out as quickly as it was started.”’
“The fire?” I said. “What fire?”
“The point is,” he said easily, flipping his hand, “that you just say that right back to him, very confidently. And then what does he say?”
“That you’re crazy?”
“No. He says, ‘Well, Macon, I’m going to let this slide because it’s only the first day, it was an honest mistake, and the fire got put out as quickly as it started.’”
I laughed. “He will not.”
“He will,” he said, nodding his head. “It’s the Jedi Mind Trick. Trust me.” And when he smiled at me, I almost did.
“I’m really not in trouble.” I handed him my schedule. “Unless that trick works on getting out of this stuff, I don’t think I can use it.”
He squinted at it. “Pre-calculus.” He looked up at me, raising his eyebrows. “Really?”
“No. I barely got through Algebra.”
He nodded at this; obviously we now had common ground. “French, P.E.... Hey, we’re in the same P.E, period.”
“Really?” Macon Faulkner and me, playing badminton. Learning golf strokes. Watching each other across a gymful of bouncing basketballs.
“Yep. Third period.” He kept reading, then reached up to take off his hat, shake his hair free, and put it back on backwards. “Science, English, blah, blah.... Oh! Looky here.”
I already knew what was coming.
“Band,” he said, smiling big. “You’re in Band.”
“I am not in Band,” I said loudly, and that same kid with the clarinet looked over at me again. “It’s a big mistake and no one believes me.”
“What do you play?” he asked me.
“I don’t,” I said. I was trying to be indignant but he was so cute. I had no idea why he was even talking to me.
“You look like the flute type,” he said thoughtfully, stroking his chin. “Or maybe the piccolo.”
“Shut up,” I said, surprising myself with my boldness.
He was laughing, shaking his head. “Maybe the triangle?” He held up his hand, pretending to hold one, and struck it wistfully with an imaginary wand.
“Leave me alone,” I moaned, putting my head in my hands and secretly hoping more than anything that he wouldn’t.
“Oh, now,” he said, and I felt his hand come around my shoulder, squeezing it, and I wanted to die right there. “I’m just razzing you.”
“This has been the worst day,” I said as he took his arm back, sliding it across my shoulders. “The worst.”
“Faulkner.” The voice was loud, quieting down the entire room, and as I looked up I saw Mr. Mathers, the junior class head counselor, standing by the front desk, a folder in his hands. He didn’t look happy. “Come on.”
“That’s me,” Macon said cheerfully, standing up and grabbing his notebook. He tapped the side of his head with a finger, winking at me. “Remember. Jedi Mind Trick.”
“Right,” I said, nodding.
“See ya later, Halley,” he said. He took his time walking over to Mr. Mathers, who clamped a hand on his shoulder and led him down the hallway. I couldn’t believe he’d even remembered my name. The Die Die Die girl was staring at me now, as if by my short encounter with Macon Faulkner I was suddenly more important or worth noticing. I definitely felt different. Macon Faulkner, who before had said less than seven words to me total in my entire lifetime, had just appeared and talked to me for, like, minutes. As if we were friends, buddies, after only one day of knowing each other formally. It gave me a weird, jumpy feeling in my stomach and I thought suddenly of Scarlett, standing at register eight at Milton’s, blushing down at a kiwi fruit.
“Hal—Hal Cooke. Is there a Hal Cooke here?” someone was saying in a bored voice from the front desk, and whatever elation I was experiencing screeched to a halt. It is times like the first day of school that I curse my parents for not naming me Jane or Lisa.
I stood up, grabbing my backpack. The counselor by the front desk, a huge African-American woman in a bright pink suit, was still trying to make out my name. “Halley,” I said as I got closer. “It’s Halley.”
“Umm-hmmm.” She turned around and gestured for me to follow her down the hall past two offices to door number three. As I passed the middle door I thought I heard Macon’s voice from behind the half-shut door, the low rumbling of Mr. Mathers mixing in. I wondered if his trick was working.
I had almost forgotten him altogether when I finally emerged, bruised and tired, with my new schedule in my hand, standing dazed outside the Guidance office as the bell ending second period rang and people suddenly began pouring out of classrooms and hallways. I went to the Coke machine to find Scarlett.
“Hey,” she called out to me over the crowd of people pushing forward with their quarters and dollar bills, mad for soda. She waved two Cokes over her head, and I followed them until I found her against the far wall, the same one Michael Sherwood had his picture snapped against for the slide show.
She handed me a Coke. “How’s Band?”
“Great,” I said, opening my can and taking a long drink. “They say I’m a prodigy already at the oboe.”
“Like hell,” she said.
I smiled. “I got out of it, thank God. But you won’t believe who I talked to in the Guidance office.”
“Who?”
A loud booing noise went up at the Coke machine, drowning us out, and someone was sent to find the janitor. It always broke at least once each day, causing a minor mutiny. I waited until the crowd had calmed down, walking off jangling their change, before I said, “Macon Faulkner.”
“Really?” She opened her backpack, rummaging through to find something. “How’s he doing?”
“He was already in trouble, I think.”
&nb
sp; “Not surprising.” She put her drink down. “God, I feel so rotten all of a sudden. Like just bad.”
“Sick?”
“Kind of.” She pulled out a bottle of Advil, popped the top, and took two. “It’s probably just my well-documented aversion to school.”
“Probably.” I watched her as she leaned back against the brick wall, closing her eyes. In the sun her hair was a deep red, almost unreal, with brighter streaks running through it.
“But anyway,” I said, “it was so weird. He just sat right next to me, just like that, and started talking my ear off. Like he knew me.”
“He does know you.”
“Yeah, but only from that one day of the funeral. Before then we’d never even been introduced.”
“So? This is a small town, Halley. Everyone knows everyone.”
“It was just weird,” I said again, replaying it in my head, from the poking on my shoulder to him saying my name as he walked away, grinning. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” she said slowly, reaching behind her head to pull her hair up in a ponytail, “maybe he likes you.”
“Oh, stop it.” My face started burning again.
“You never know. You shouldn’t always assume it’s so impossible.”
The bell rang and I finished off my Coke, tossing it in the recycling bin beside me. “On to third period.”
“Ugh. Oceanography.” She put on her backpack. “What about you?”
“I have—” I started, but someone tapped my shoulder, then was gone as I turned around, the classic fake-out. I turned back to Scarlett and saw Macon over her shoulder, on his way to the gym.
“Come on,” he yelled across the now-empty courtyard to me. “Don’t want to be late for P.E.”
“—P.E.,” I finished sheepishly, feeling the burn of a new blush on my face. “I better go.”
Scarlett just looked at me, shaking her head, like she already knew something I didn’t. “Watch out,” she said quietly, pulling her backpack over her shoulders.
“For what?” I said.
“You know,” she said, and her face was so sad, watching me. Then she shook her head, smiling, and started to walk away. “Just be careful. Of P.E. and all that.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering if she had visions of me being nailed by errant Wiffle balls or blinded by flying badminton birdies, or if it was only just Macon, and everything he reminded her of, that made her so sad. “I will,” I said.
She waved and walked off, up the hill to the Sciences building, and I turned and went the other way, pushing open the gym doors to that smell of mildew and Ben-Gay and sweaty mats, where Macon Faulkner was waiting for me.
P.E. became the most important fifty minutes of my life. Regardless of illness, national disaster, or even death, I would have shown up for third period, in my white socks and blue shorts, ready at the bell. Macon missed occasionally, and those days I was miserable, swatting around my volleyball halfheartedly and watching the clock. But the days he was there, P.E. was the best thing I had going.
Of course I acted like I hated it completely, because it was worse than being a Band geek to actually like P.E. But I was the only one in the girls’ locker room who didn’t complain loudly as we dressed out at 10:30 A.M. for another day of volleyball basics. All I had to do was walk out of the dressing room, nonchalant, acting like I was still half-asleep and too out of it to notice Macon, who was usually over by the water fountain in nonregulation tennis shoes and no socks (for which he got a minus-five each day of class). I’d sit a few feet over from him, wave, and pretend I wasn’t expecting him to slide the few feet across the floor to sit beside me, which he always did. Always. Usually those few minutes before Coach Van Leek got organized with his clipboard were the best part of my day, every day. With a few variations, they went something like this:
Macon: What’s up?
Me: I’m so beat.
Macon: Yeah, I was out late last night.
Me: (like I was ever allowed out past eight on school nights)
Me, too. I see you’re not wearing socks today, again.
Macon: I just forget.
Me: You’re gonna fail P.E., you know.
Macon: Not if you buy me some socks.
Me: (laughing sarcastically) Yeah, right.
Macon: Okay. Then it’s on your head.
Me: Shut up.
Macon: You ready for volleyball?
Me: (like I’m so tough) Of course. I’m going to beat your
butt.
Macon: (laughing) Okay. Sure. We’ll see.
Me: Okay. We’ll see.
I lived for this.
Macon was not in school to Get an Education or Prepare for College. It was just a necessary evil, tempered by junk food and perpetual tardies. Half the time he showed up looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, and he was forever getting yelled at by Coach for sneaking food into P.E.: Cokes slipped in his backpack, Atomic Fireballs and Twinkles stuffed in his pockets. He was the master of the forged excuse.
“Faulkner,” Coach would bark when Macon showed up, ten minutes late, with no socks and half a Zinger sticking out of his mouth, “you’d best have a note.”
“Right here,” Macon would say cheerfully, drawing one out of his pocket. We’d all watch attentively as Coach scrutinized it. Macon never looked worried. He failed all of P.E.’s notoriously easy quizzes, but he could copy any signature perfectly on the first try. It was a gift.
“It’s all in the wrist,” he’d tell me as he excused himself for another funeral or doctor’s appointment with a flourish of his mother’s name. I kept waiting for him to get caught. But it never happened.
He didn’t seem to have a curfew; all I knew about his mom was that she didn’t dot her is. I didn’t even know where he lived. Macon was wild, different, and when I was with him, caught up in it all, I could play along like I was, too. He told me about parties where the cops always came, or road trips he up and took in the middle of the night, no planning, to the beach or D.C., just because he felt like it. He showed up on Mondays with wild stories, T-shirts of bands I’d never heard of, smeared entry stamps from one club or another on the back of his hands. He dropped names and places I’d never heard, but I nodded, committing them to memory and repeating them back to Scarlett as if I knew them all myself, had been there or seen that. Something in him, about him, with his easy loping walk and sly smile, his past secret and mysterious while mine was all laid out and clear, actually documented, intrigued me beyond belief.
Scarlett, of course, just shook her head and smiled as she listened to me prattle on, detailing every word and gesture of our inane sock-and-volleyball conversations. And she sat by without saying anything whenever he didn’t show up and I sulked at lunch, picking at my sandwich and saying it wasn’t like I liked him anyway. And sometimes, I’d look up at her and see that same sad look on her face, as if Michael Sherwood had suddenly reared up from wherever she’d carefully placed him, reminding her of the beginning of summer when she was the one with all the stories to tell.
Meanwhile, all through September, things were happening. My father’s radio show on T104 had gotten an overhaul and format change over the summer and was suddenly The Station to Listen To. In the morning I heard his voice coming from cars in the parking lot or at traffic lights or even at the Zip Mart where Scarlett and I stopped before school for Cokes and gas. My father, making jokes and razzing callers and playing all the music I listened to, the soundtrack to every move I made. Brian in the Morning! the billboard out by the mall said; He’s better than Wheaties! My father thought this was hysterical, even better than A Neighborhood of Fiends, and my mother accused him of always taking the long way home just to look at it. His was the voice I heard no matter where I went, inseparable from my life away from our house. It was somewhat unsettling that listening to my father was suddenly cool.
The worst was when he talked about me. I was in the Zip Mart before school one day, and of course they had T104 on; people were
calling in sharing their most embarrassing moments. About half my school was buying cigarettes and cookies and candy bars, that early morning sugar and nicotine rush. I was at the head of the line when I heard my name.
“Yeah, I remember when my daughter Halley was about five,” my father said. “Man, this is like the funniest thing I ever saw. We were at this neighborhood cookout, and my wife and I...”
Already my face was turning red. I could feel my temperature jump about ten degrees with each word he said. The clerk, of course, picked this moment to change the register tape. I was stuck.
“So we’re standing there talking to some neighbors, right next to this huge mud puddle; it had been raining for a few days and everything was still kind of squishy, you know? Anyway, Halley yells out to me, ‘Hey, Dad, look!’ So my wife and I look over and here she comes, running like little kids do, all crooked and sideways, you know?”
“Damn,” the clerk said, hitting the register tape with his fist. It wasn’t going in. I was in hell.
“And I swear,” my father went on, now chuckling, “I was thinking as she got closer and closer to that mud puddle, Man, she’s going in. I could see it coming.”
Behind me somebody tittered. My stomach turned in on itself.
“And she hits the edge of that puddle, still running, and her feet just—they just flew out from under her.” Now my father dissolved in laughter, along with, oh, about a thousand commuters and office workers all over the tri-county area. “I mean, she skidded on her butt, all the way across that puddle, bumping along with this completely shocked look on her face, until she, like, landed right at out feet. Covered in mud. And we’re all trying not to laugh, God help us. It was the funniest thing I think I have ever seen. Ever.”
“That’ll be one-oh-nine,” the clerk said to me suddenly. I threw my dollar and some change at him, pushing past all the grinning faces out to the car, where Scarlett was waiting.
“Oh, man,” she said as I slid in. “How embarrassed are you right now?”
“Shut up,” I said. All day I had to listen to the mud jokes and have people nudge me and giggle. Macon christened me Muddy Britches. It was the worst.