Crossing the parking lot toward the street, I pass Juniper Kipling’s empty Mercedes, a shimmering foreigner in the crowd of scuffed Jeeps and mud-splattered pickup trucks. Weird—I thought Juniper was driving my sister home today.
As I reach the sidewalk, I stick my hands deep in my pockets, steeling myself for the journey. It’s not a long way home—two miles, maybe—but it’s getting cold these days. Soon I’ll have to start asking people for rides after rehearsal. I dread the awkward car conversations already.
No matter what, when I talk to people, I come off as an asshole. They should leave me alone, for their sake as much as mine. Whenever someone breaks my privacy, my head fills with panic, panic, panic. I lose my thoughts in white noise and fuzz. A short, sizzling fuse. And what comes out of my mouth is always angry bullshit.
Life is better when it’s scripted.
AN HOUR LATER, I’M STILL THINKING ABOUT HER EYES and her attention, lying back and letting that glance loop in endless repeat.
She looked at me. The thought of it keeps turning, replaying, spinning like a mobile or a galaxy, and it feels even more impossible now that I’m this high.
When you’re high, getting stares usually feels fine, because unless you’re having a bad high and feeling paranoid as hell, the staring person seems like just another citizen of the world, and that’s chill. But even if I weren’t high, I’d be freaking out over Olivia Scott giving me the eye. I sit three rows behind her in English, and I spend about 108 percent of that class staring at the back of her head, wondering how she gets her hair that rich and straight and glossy. Everything I’ve heard her say is hilarious, and when she smiles, it’s so high-voltage, I start a little, every damn time. Olivia Scott is magnificent.
Sometimes I can’t help resenting her raucous laugh and her sexy, poised, confident body and her blaze-blue eyes, because she only notices assholes like Dan Silverstein, and I have no idea why. But then I remember that if by some miracle she noticed me instead, I’d feel super-awkward, because we don’t have any friends in common. I don’t even know if we’d get along. From what I’ve seen, she’s one of those semi-geeks who likes school enough to do well but not enough to try. Who even knows how that works? It’s like . . . I don’t know, but if you’re going to not give a shit, at least devote yourself to not giving a shit, right?
But what the hell do I know? I’ve never spoken to her. She could be totally different from what I’ve seen and heard.
Still. She looked at me, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I pick up the joint from my car roof and play around with the smoke, sniffing it, licking it up, rolling it across my tongue and through my teeth. It’s not sanitary, letting the thing sit on my roof like that, but I’ve done worse, and I know Burke’s done worse. He picked a joint up off the sidewalk one time and took a drag for shits and giggles, and he didn’t get sick, even though I insisted for a week that he was going to get oral herpes or some shit. Then again, Burke has the immune system of a god.
My watch hits five o’clock. The drama geeks pour down the hill from the auditorium, trickle into their scattered cars, and drive off.
I take a hit and stare up at the clouds, those plumes of cotton and Marshmallow Fluff, their underbellies pinkened by the dying sun. It’s crazy that they’re so huge, and crazier that something so colossal is so temporary, that they’ll never be the same as they are now, and as soon as they turn heavy and cry themselves down in sheets of rain, they’ll be gone, as if they were never looming a mile above the crown of my head. This day is lost already. This hour is as good as going, going, gone.
I shut my eyes and flush out the thoughts, and new ones float in like breezes, like the sound of chimes. Minutes swirl around me, and seconds fall across my skin with the tingle, the prickle, the itch of dying sunlight, and Jesus, have I ever been this relaxed in my life?
Then a familiar voice splinters my nirvana with an “Hola, Mateo,” and I keep my eyes closed and slur out a “No hablo Spanish,” and the voice says, “Yeah, sure, Mr. Half-Mexican,” and I say, “Please, man, I’m, like, six hundred percent American,” which Mamá would kill me for saying, because it’s probably an Insult to My Cultural Heritage or something.
I peer off the side of my car at Burke. In the red light of sunset, and with my head tilted sideways, he looks like something out of a horror movie, his nose and ear and eyebrow piercings glinting, a sleeve of black-and-purple tattoos twisted up his left arm like an injury. He’s wearing his bleached hair in gelled spikes today.
“Yo, man,” I say, and as he climbs up the back of my car onto my roof, he grunts, “You been out here smoking, huh?” and I’m like, “Yeah, nothing else to do. You?”
“I was reading. Waiting for one of my sculptures to cool.” He waves a book at me. When Burke’s not welding metal sculptures out of abandoned hubcaps and steel rods, he spends all his time reading, which people never guess, because he looks like every gang-member stereotype ever conceived. In reality, he’s probably the most well-read, intelligent person at this school—not counting Valentine Simmons, because I refuse to count that pretentious dickhead—and no one knows it, because Burke’s way sneaky about the whole smart thing.
Sometimes I’d swear Burke is from a different planet. He’s normal if you talk to him, but besides me, nobody ever talks to him, because they can’t get past the way he looks. It’s not just the ink and the piercings and the hair, which he dyes a different color every other week. It’s his clothes, which are weird at best and embarrassing at worst. Last Friday, he strolled into school wearing neon-yellow skinny jeans and platform shoes. Today, he has on a green peacoat, jean leggings, and a kilt. It looks like a Goodwill threw up on him.
He wears makeup, too. Not standard emo-kid guyliner, either. Like, bright blue lipstick, the other week, and orange eye shadow, the day before yesterday. Today he’s clean-faced, but back in freshman year, he didn’t go a day without it. His whole persona, this whole thing he does with the way he looks—it happened so suddenly, right out of middle school, I wondered if it was performance art, maybe. Some big stunt I wasn’t part of. Now, though, I’m so used to it, I hardly notice when he goes crazy with winged eyeliner and purple eyebrows.
At first I thought he’d get beat up, but it turns out that people are terrified to talk shit about Burke because he’s six foot five and built like a Mack truck, and sometimes when he’s dressed down he looks as if he’d knife you without thinking about it. But Jesus, if he were my size, he’d get laughed out of Kansas.
I take his book and squint at the title. It’s called The Gay Science, written by some foreign dude whose name looks like a sneeze. How can he read this stuff for fun?
“What?” he says, looking hard at me, and I’m like, “Nothing, man, you do you.” I drop the book into his backpack and pass him the blunt. He takes a hit.
“So Dan got with Olivia Scott,” I say, and Burke’s like, “Yeah, I heard him talking about it. Apparently she was great,” and I stare up at the sky, and he’s like, “What?” and I’m like, “I didn’t say anything,” and he’s like, “Your silence is more silent than usual silence,” and I’m like, “Shut up,” and he’s like, “So I’m right.”
I shrug. “Fine. Olivia’s awesome, and Dan sucks, and why does he get to have sex with her, is all I’m saying.”
“Hey, why you gotta shit on Dan? Just ’cause you’re jealous doesn’t mean—”
I chuckle. “Dude, I couldn’t be jealous of Dan if I tried.” And that part, at least, is true, because it’s hard to describe the soul-sucking blandness that is Daniel Silverstein. He has no personality anymore; he just wants to stick his dick in things. Sometimes you look at people, and you can see every second that’s going to make up their lives, and it depresses you, because they’re clearly fated to do nothing that’ll last even a decade after their death, and it’s like, why are you sitting all cushy in this suburb when a million disadvantaged kids out there could do so much more with your place in this world? T
hat’s Dan these days. It blows seeing him turn into that, too, since he used to be different.
Back in middle school, Dan and Burke and I used to hang out all the time. Middle-school Dan loved dubstep and Mario Kart and late-night walks, where the three of us would talk about everything from what aliens might look like to the meaning of life. But the second we hit freshman year, high-school Dan took over. He stopped talking to us and found new friends, and now every time we pass each other in the hall, he doesn’t even nod. Burke and I try not to take it personally, but getting friend-dumped is kind of personal by definition.
Burke taps my shoulder and passes the blunt back to me. I take a long hit—too long—and sit up, my eyes watering, and Burke says, “So why’re you mad at Dan, huh?” and I sigh, because I feel he should get it by now. “Because,” I say, “I’ve had a thing for Olivia Scott for, like, thirty years,” and Burke says, “But you haven’t ever spoken to her,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but . . .”
I trail off, floundering to find actual justification for being upset. After a minute, I give up. “Forget it,” I mumble. We watch sports teams walking by, red-faced and sweaty from practice. Guys’ tennis. Girls’ cross-country. Lacrosse. Football . . .
Eventually, Burke says, “If you want to meet up with Olivia, why don’t you go to the thing at Dan’s this weekend, huh? Maybe she’ll be there.”
I make a grumbling sound. I’d rather chug cyanide than show up to Dan’s sister’s birthday party. It’s sad, the thought that everyone I know is so repressed, they have to get, like, oh my God, totally wasted to have an excuse to act the way they want to act. “Thanks, man, but I’m good,” I say. “Like she’d talk to me, anyway.”
“Bro, don’t be so fucking defeatist,” Burke says, and that’s a Burke phrase if ever I’ve heard one, so fucking defeatist, but before I can tell him he’s ridiculous, an overloud voice butts in:
“Hey. Are you Matt? Matt Jackson?”
I turn. A couple of varsity tennis girls have stopped near my car. The only one I know by name—the one who’s talking to me—is Claire Lombardi, who has enough freckles for a family of four, as well as an arsenal of identical tank tops that display Nike across her huge chest. The girl is Paloma-famous, since she does every miserable extracurricular this place has to offer: debate team, French Club, Academic Bowl, Young Environmentalists, student government . . . the list goes on.
She moves to the front of my hood, brushing her frizzy red hair out of her face. Since I can’t remember having actually spoken with her before, and since I stay under the radar, it’s kind of weird that she knows my name, but I reply, “Uh, yeah. Hey,” and she says, “We missed you this afternoon. I can send you the information later by email, though.”
“What?” I say, glancing at Burke. “Missed what?”
“Student gov. There are only three candidates, so your chances are pretty good.”
“I—chances for—?”
“Make sure you start campaigning next week. It’d be great for the program to have some competition in the presidential race, at least. For, like, visibility’s sake.”
“Um,” I say, trying not to let my confusion show, and she’s like, “You’re running against Juniper Kipling and Olivia Scott, if you were wondering,” and I’m like, “But I—” and then one of her tennis friends nudges her. Claire glances to the right. Her gaze fixes on something near the far end of the lot, and she says too fast, “Heading out—see you,” and leaves me sitting there wondering what the hell just happened.
I check over my shoulder to see who scared her off. It’s the guys’ swim team. For a moment I wonder what Claire’s issue is, but then, from the middle of the pack, Lucas McCallum gives me his usual cheerful wave, and I remember his and Claire’s heinous breakup last spring, which nobody could shut up about for frickin’ ever.
Lucas bounces by, pushing his curly hair back, a smile the size of California plastered across his face as usual. “Hi, Burke! Hey, Matt! How’s it going, guys?”
I nod in response, wondering if his cheeks ever get tired. If you turned a six-week-old puppy into a human being, you’d get Lucas. Dude’s so cheerful all the time, I keep getting this creeping suspicion that he thinks we’re friends because he sells me weed. But that wouldn’t make sense—he deals to half the school, providing the teeming masses with an ass-load of pot and cheap beer. Maybe Lucas is just chronically overjoyed to be alive.
He jogs off with the rest of the swim team, leaving Burke and me alone.
“Dude, I don’t know what Claire’s talking about,” I say, looking at Burke. “I didn’t sign up for anything.”
A second passes, and the corner of Burke’s mouth twitches.
“You shithead,” I say, realizing. “You did this. You put me on some list for this.” And Burke cracks up, and he’s like, “Who, me? ’Course not. But I can’t wait to see your campaign promises.”
I punch him. “I’m gonna kill you.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun.”
I blow my hair out of my eyes, giving him the dirtiest look I can muster, but I can never stay mad long—I don’t have the dedication for grudges. Good thing for Burke, too, ’cause he’s always doing this, dragging me to after-school clubs or putting my email address on information dis-lists. It’s the most random stuff. Last week he signed me up for some national newsletter about clock making. God knows what he’s getting out of it.
I lean back on the roof. Dusk hunches over the sky, and the twisted end of our joint blisters on the asphalt beside the car, the bittersweet smell of it floating and fading.
“So, who do you think it is?” Burke says, and I’m like, “Who do you think what is?” and he’s like, “Didn’t you go to the assembly?” and I laugh so hard, it turns into a coughing fit. “Is that a serious question?” I sputter, and he’s like, “Some teacher’s sleeping with a student. They don’t know who yet.”
I give him a confused look and ask, “Am I supposed to care about this?” and he’s like, “I mean, it’s sort of crazy, huh?” and I’m like, “Not that crazy. It happens everywhere,” and he sighs and says, “What’s it gotta take for you to be interested in anything, huh, dude?” and I’m sort of affronted. “Hey, get off my case, would you?” I say. “We can’t all be, like, conscientious citizens and read The fucking Gay Science for fun.”
Burke shrugs, adjusting his kilt. “It’s got nothing to do with reading, man,” he says. “I’m talking about, literally, anything. I miss when we used to do shit that wasn’t smoking, you know?” and I want to retort, but for the second time in ten minutes, I can’t find justification.
The silence stresses me out. What does he want, an apology?
At a loss for what else to do, I pull out my phone. A missed call pops up. It’s Mom. “I gotta get home,” I say, and Burke’s like, “Yeah, it’s getting cold,” which I guess is sort of true, but I’d stick out even freezing temperatures to remain in the lazy, forgiving environment of late-afternoon Paloma High, because staying here means I don’t have to go home. Also, it’s nice being around Burke, because he’s always thinking something or reading something or making something, and maybe it’s pathetic to live vicariously through my best friend, but my hobbies of sleeping, eating, and avoiding responsibilities seem lackluster by comparison. Not that I’d ever tell him that.
My phone rings. I pick up. “Hello?”
“¿Dónde estás?” comes the sharp question.
I sigh and look up at the sky. “I’ll be right there, Mamá. Calm down, would you?”
She hangs up on me. Nice.
“God, she’s the worst,” I say, and Burke says calmly, “I’m sure there’s been worse,” and I give him a glare, because when he gets all reasonable like this, he makes me feel guilty about being unhappy, and that’s unhelpful at the best of times. “Later, man,” he says, rolling off my car. He buttons his peacoat, loops his scarf twice around his beefy neck, and takes off for his Jeep.
I climb off my car. By the time I slide in, Burk
e’s already gone. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I consider rolling another joint to calm myself down, but then I’m distracted by a glimpse of Juniper Kipling hurrying to her Mercedes, the only car left in the junior lot besides mine.
She slips in, takes a second, and starts bawling her eyes out, which baffles me, because what problems could her perfect life ever have? And couldn’t she go home to do the whole crying thing?
As I shift into drive, I feel like a douchebag for thinking that, because, to be fair, this place is basically empty, and it’s not her fault if she’s going through something personal. But hey, maybe I’m just bitter because people like Juniper have these roads set up, these highways to success. She’s going to go to Yale or Harvard or whatever, partially because she’s a music prodigy and smart as all hell, and partially because her parents are filthy rich. And me? Even if I go to college, my parents sure aren’t paying for it. Once I move out, college or not, God knows if they’ll even stay together. Last night, they argued so late, I had to go in there and ask them to cut it out for Russell’s sake. Who’s going to stick up for my kid brother when I’m not around anymore?
I stare out my sunroof at the dusk. I hate getting angry or sad or upset. About my parents. About anything. It always seems angsty and undeserved. What are you, every teenager ever? says a voice in the back of my head. Be a little original, asshole.
I take my time driving home.
Finally,
I am the last car here.
I am an island.
I returned here,
tugged back by some irresistible gravity,
but I hit the ground too hard.
My knees have buckled,
leaving me prostrate.
Stop crying. You’re in public.
Grip the wheel tight and
Seven Ways We Lie Page 3