“I know stuff,” he says, breaking into a grin. “You guys think teachers are, like, deaf, blind dinosaurs, like we shuffle around with no idea what’s going on.”
“No, that’s not what I think!” I protest.
Bex’s lips twist. “Yeah, yeah.”
“It’s not,” I insist, giggling a little. “But yeah. Jacob is awesome.”
“Good,” Bex says, glancing over his shoulder before switching into the turn lane, long fingers hooked casually at the bottom of the wheel. “Most high school guys are basically walking mailboxes. You’re right to hold out for someone great.”
A pleased, unfamiliar blush creeps up my chest, hot and prickly. I’m glad I’m wearing a scarf. “Thanks,” I say, fussing with the sticky zipper on the outside pocket of my backpack, yanking ineffectually at the pull.
Bex shrugs. “It’s true.”
I nod. “Um, this is me up here,” I tell him, nodding at my parents’ tiny colonial. “Thanks again for the ride.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“See you tomorrow,” I say, unlatching the door handle.
“Hey, Marin,” he says, laying a hand on my arm as I’m getting out of the car; I feel the zing of it clear down my spine, my whole skeleton jangling pleasantly. “Just to be safe, uh. You probably shouldn’t mention to anybody at school that I drove you.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised. “Okay.”
“At the last place I worked it was different—it was a boarding school, so I drove students around all the time, you know? I had students over to my apartment for dinner like once a week. But here . . .” He trails off. “DioGuardi runs a different kind of ship.”
“No, no, I totally get it.” I didn’t know he worked at a boarding school before he came to Bridgewater. I’m instantly, weirdly jealous of all the students he ever cooked dinner for. “I won’t say anything.”
“Thanks, pal,” Bex says, grinning a little bashfully. “Have a good night.”
“You too,” I say, shutting the passenger door gently and lifting my hand in a dopey wave. I stand on the darkened lawn until the Jeep disappears out of sight.
Two
Emily’s party is two nights later, so Jacob picks me up in the Subaru his parents got him for his seventeenth birthday and we swing by Chloe’s house on the way.
“Hey,” I say, turning around in my seat as she settles herself in the back, unwinding her fuzzy scarf from around her neck.
Ancient Whitney Houston croons on the stereo, the air in the car heavy with the scent of the cologne Jacob swears he doesn’t spray on the heating vents.
“Where were you this afternoon? I thought we were going to do layout stuff.”
Chloe shakes her head. “Covered a shift at work,” she explains. “Rosie had a doctor’s appointment. Sorry, I meant to text you. It was super last-minute.”
Chloe’s parents own a Greek restaurant called Niko’s; we both started working there in eighth grade, first busing tables and now waiting them.
“Bex wasn’t there either,” I complain, pulling one leg up underneath me and reaching out to turn the heat down. “It was just me and Michael Cyr in there, which meant I had to listen to him talk for like a full hour about how he just discovered Breaking Bad and Walter White is his new hero.”
“Just you and Michael Cyr, huh?” Jacob asks, glancing over at me from the driver’s seat. “Should I be jealous?”
“Only if you feel threatened by a guy who met all his best friends on Reddit,” I say, reaching out to poke him in the rib cage.
Jacob grabs my finger and squeezes. Chloe rolls her eyes.
Emily’s house is a sprawling ranch in a midcentury development full of identical sprawling ranches, all of them painted in different pastel colors.
“Once, when I was in second grade, I got off the bus and walked right into the wrong one,” Emily says, leading us down the hallway and pulling a couple of beers out of an iceless cooler near the back door. “This old lady Gloria sat me down at her kitchen table and made me soda bread, and then she was my best friend for like three years until she died.”
Right away Jacob gets absorbed into a crowd of his lacrosse buddies—Joey and Ahmed, plus Gray Kendall and a few other dudes. The rumor is Gray got kicked out of his fancy prep school last year for throwing the kind of wild parties where people wind up in the hospital for eating Tide PODS. In barely two months at Bridgewater he’s fooled around with what seems like basically every girl at school, an unending parade of hopeful-looking underclassmen hanging around outside the locker room on game days. It’s deeply embarrassing for everyone, although I can admit he’s ridiculously cute.
Chloe and I make ourselves comfortable on the staircase that leads to the second floor, listening to Cardi B rapping tinnily from the Bluetooth speaker on the coffee table. A couple of awkward-looking freshman guys cluster around a video on somebody’s cell phone. Slutty Deanna Montalto lounges on the sofa next to Trina Meng.
“Did you hear the thing about Deanna and Tyler Ramos in the auditorium?” Chloe asks quietly, running her thumb around the mouth of her beer bottle. “I feel like she’s basically the whole reason behind the new dress-code memo.”
“Oh my god, the no-more-knee-socks thing?” Emily asks, plunking down on the stair below us with a can of spiked seltzer in one hand. “So dumb.”
“So dumb,” I agree. “Like, explain to me how these delicate, precious boys are supposedly going to be too distracted by our knees of all things to get any work done.” I stand up and grab Jacob’s arm over the banister, pulling him partway out of the scrum of lacrosse bros. “Can I ask you a question?” I say, lacing our fingers together. “How exactly is us wearing tights instead of knee socks going to help you idiots learn better?”
“It’s not,” Jacob says immediately, his grin wide and wicked. “What it is going to interfere with is Charlie Rinaldi’s robust side hustle of taking pictures up your skirts in the cafeteria and selling them online.”
Joey and Ahmed bust up laughing. Even Chloe cracks a grin.
“You’re disgusting,” I inform Jacob, smacking him gently on the elbow, but I can’t help but let out a laugh of my own.
The only one who isn’t laughing is Gray, who’s leaning his lanky body against the post at the bottom of the staircase. “Anybody need a beer?” he asks, holding up his empty bottle. He tips it at us in a salute before he turns and walks away.
“That dude is the fucking weirdest,” Jacob says once he’s gone, slinging a heavy arm around my shoulders. I watch Gray’s broad back disappear into the crowd.
The party breaks up early—turns out Emily Cerato’s parents didn’t know she was having one to begin with and weren’t super thrilled when they came home from dinner and a show down in the Theater District and found two dozen teenagers sprawled all over their furniture.
“How the hell did Emily not realize they were seeing a one-act play?” Chloe asks as we dash across the lawn to Jacob’s car, her scarf flapping behind her in the sharp autumn wind.
“Maybe we should have tried to convince them they were at the wrong house,” I shoot back. That cracks her up, which cracks me up; by the time we manage to get our seat belts buckled Jacob looks about ready to leave us both on the side of the road altogether. “Take a little pity on your sober driver, here.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I assure him, still giggling; I’m pretty sure he finds Chloe and me kind of annoying together, though he’s too nice to say so. “Let’s go.”
Turns out all three of us are starving, so we swing through the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s for fries and milk shakes before heading over to Chloe’s to drop her off.
“See you at work tomorrow?” I ask, turning around in the passenger seat to look at her. Usually the two of us are on the same Saturday schedule, but tonight she shakes her head.
“I’m off tomorrow,” she explains, prying her milk shake out of the cupholder and slinging her bag over one narrow shoulder. “I’m spending the weekend at Kyra’s.”
I frown. “Really?”
Kyra is her slightly younger cousin, who lives in Watertown and is super into her Greek Orthodox youth group. I know her from years of going to Chloe’s birthday parties, and she’s cool in a straightedge kind of way, but I definitely wouldn’t call them super close.
“Why?”
She shrugs. “My parents want us to be friends, I don’t know. They’re probably hoping she’ll teach me to pray in Greek.”
“Oh man,” I tease. “Good luck, Kyra.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Chloe rolls her eyes. “Thanks for the ride, Jacob. I’ll see you guys Monday.”
Once she’s inside, Jacob turns to me, his sharp face familiar in the light from the dashboard. “You need to get home right away?” he asks.
I glance at the clock, hesitating. I’ve got a little over an hour before my curfew, truthfully, but I also know what he’s actually asking, which is whether I want to go park under the copse of trees at the far end of the Bridgewater parking lot and mess around for a while. “Um.”
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, obviously,” Jacob says quickly.
“Gee, thanks.” I make a face.
“Oh, come on.” Jacob frowns, wounded. “You know what I mean. I’m not trying to be some, like, pressuring douchebag. I just meant—”
“No, I know.” I wave a hand to stop him, a little embarrassed. He’s right, actually—Jacob’s never given me a hard time about the fact that we haven’t had sex yet, even though I can tell he’s a tiny bit disappointed every time we’re getting up to something and I finally stop him. And it’s not even that I don’t want to, necessarily. I meant what I said to Bex the other day—Jacob is great. He’s smart. Everybody is always saying how funny he is. He’s the assistant coach of his little brother’s peewee basketball team, for God’s sake. And if sometimes I feel like I’m still kind of waiting for some crazy zing of recognition, some feeling of Oh, it’s you—well, this is high school, not a Netflix original rom-com. There’s no reason to be such a girl about the whole thing.
Finally I sigh, reaching out with one finger and snapping Jacob’s seat belt lightly across his chest. “Let’s go,” I tell him.
Jacob grins.
Three
Gracie has a chess tournament in Harvard Square the following weekend, so I tag along with my parents to go see her play. The thing about competitive chess is that even at the middle school level—especially at the middle school level—the various matchups are basically more complicated than March Madness seeding, which means that over the years I’ve spent an awful lot of time sitting around in random auditoriums waiting for it to be my sister’s turn to wipe the floor with supposed prodigies from Newton and Andover.
Today the proceedings are even slower than usual; somebody’s little brother is kicking the back of my chair periodically, and the dry, forced heat is making me yawn. Gracie sits to my side with her eyes closed and her head tilted back against the red velvet auditorium seat, listening to Christmas music. My phone buzzes with a text from Jacob—a Bitmoji of himself snowboarding, his tongue hanging out like a dog’s. I stopped him—again—before things went too far the night of Emily’s party, though he didn’t actually seem put out about it. He’s spending this weekend at his cousin’s house in Vermont, so possibly he’s too excited about “shredding the mountain”—his words, not mine—to be annoyed about not getting into my pants.
“I’m going to find a coffee shop and do some homework,” I finally whisper.
My mom nods. “Don’t go too far,” she instructs, fishing a ten-dollar bill out of her purse and handing it over. “I’ll text you before her match.”
In the end I post up at the big Starbucks near the T stop, the windows fogged with the damp chill outside. I pull my laptop out of my backpack and watch the tourists and college kids waiting in line for their coffees, the hipsters with their tattoos and undercuts. Sometimes I think it would be cool to look a little more like them, to try bright pink hair or an eyebrow ring or whatever. Then I imagine the curious looks and snarky comments I know I’d get if I ever did anything like that at Bridgewater, and it seems safer to just blend in.
“Marin?”
I look up and gasp, almost knocking over my cup at the sight of Bex standing next to my table in jeans and a worn-in hoodie. With his glasses and his coffee cup he looks like a college kid home for the holiday weekend, messenger bag slung over his shoulder and laptop tucked under one arm.
“I thought that was you,” he says.
“Oh!” I steady my cup on the table, offering him a smile. “Hi.”
“Sorry,” he says, “am I traumatizing you right now?” He grins. “I saw my first-grade principal at the pool once, and I don’t think I ever really recovered. A nun in a bathing suit, just to burn that image into your mind like it’s burned into mine.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Nuns are allowed to wear bathing suits?”
“Apparently.” Bex shudders, then nods his chin at my computer. “What are you working on?”
I glance down at the screen with gritty eyes, then back at him. “My admission essay for Brown,” I admit.
“Really?” He frowns. “Deadline is coming up, right? It’s not like you to have put it off this long.”
“It’s done, honestly,” I confess, dumbly pleased that he’s been paying close enough attention lately to know what is and isn’t like me. “Or, I mean, it’s done in that it’s a five-paragraph essay with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I just keep noodling on it though. I want it to be absolutely one hundred percent.”
“Curse of the perfectionist,” Bex says with a knowing smile. “Want me to take a look?”
I shake my head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“No, seriously,” he says. “I want to.” He sets his own battered MacBook down on the table. “Come on, hand it over.”
“What, right now?”
He shrugs. “Do you have a better time?” He sits down in the empty chair across from me, holding his arms out for my laptop. I click my browser shut—probably there’s no reason for him to know that I’ve been procrastinating by trawling Riverdale fan fiction—before passing it across the table, wrapping my hands awkwardly around my empty cup.
“Well, I definitely can’t sit here while you’re reading it,” I announce barely five seconds later. I get up and stand in line for another latte—unable to help glancing over my shoulder, searching Bex’s face while he reads. His eyes are serious behind his tortoiseshell glasses. The weak afternoon sunlight catches the gold in his hair.
A few minutes later, I walk back to the table, chewing my lip.
“This is fantastic,” he says before I even sit down.
I manage to stop my hands before they fly to my mouth, but barely. “Really?”
Bex nods. “Honestly, Marin, I’ve read a lot of admission essays, and I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. Your writing is, like, super mature.”
“Well, thanks.” I glance down at my cup, trying not to smile too widely. He’s not the first teacher to tell me that; still, coming from Bex it’s like it somehow means more. “I mean, realistically I’m still going to be messing with it until the deadline, but I really appreciate it.”
Bex laughs. “I’m the same way. Like I said: curse of the perfectionist,” he says, tilting his chair back onto its hind legs as if he’s sitting in a classroom himself. “Listen, I don’t know if you know this, but I went to Brown. And so did my dad . . . and so did his dad, actually.” He smiles a little sheepishly. “When you go for your interview, look out for Beckett Auditorium.”
“Oh, wow,” I say, eyes widening as I cop on. I had heard his family had money, but I never realized there was that much of it. “Yeah, I will.”
“Anyway, I just wanted to say that if you ever wanted me to put a call in, try and throw my weight around a little bit, I’d be happy to do it. I don’t know if anyone there will give a shit, but it couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Thank you,�
�� I say, nodding my head and mustering a smile. “That would be amazing.”
Bex nods, satisfied. “Honestly, my pleasure. You earned it.”
“So, um, what about you?” I ask, motioning with my cup at his laptop. “What are you working on?”
“Oh, Jesus,” he says with a rueful shake of his head. “You don’t want to know.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Well, now you have to tell me.”
“My novel.” Bex visibly cringes, dropping his face into his hands. “I can’t believe I’m even saying that out loud to you right now. Go ahead, have a laugh.”
My eyes widen. “You’re writing a novel? Seriously? What’s it about?”
Bex sighs theatrically, lifting his head to look at me again. “I’m trusting you with this, you realize. You could ruin me.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“No, I know you wouldn’t.” He shifts his weight again, the front legs of the chair hitting the tile floor with a clatter. “It’s about a guy who wants to be a theater actor, but he’s not a very good theater actor, so he’s working for a children’s theater doing puppet shows about the Revolutionary War and stuff. And then his dad dies.” He makes a face. “See, it sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid,” I promise immediately. “Honestly, it sounds good. Is it, like, autobiographical, or . . .”
Bex makes a face, enigmatic. “My dad is alive,” is all he says. “Anyway, I’ve been writing it since undergrad, and I’ve got a mostly done draft. But I just keep on . . .”
“Noodling?” I supply with a laugh. “Curse of the perfectionist, right?”
“Exactly,” he says, tapping his paper cup against mine.
I’m expecting him to move to one of the other empty tables, but instead he stays where he is while I drink my second latte, caffeine buzzing wildly through my veins. We chat about all kinds of things: our Starbucks orders—Americanos, he tells me—and his parents’ aging collie, an exhibit on protest art he saw at the contemporary art museum. I’m struck again by that same feeling I had the day he drove me home after school a couple of weeks ago, that he’s weirdly easy to talk to for a teacher.
Rules for Being a Girl Page 2