by Melissa Grey
“Did anything interesting happen at school this week?”
She had never asked Bex a follow-up question. Not once. Not even when Bex was twelve and had come home with an unfortunately uneven chin-length haircut, performed by Melody in the bathroom of Jackson Hills Middle School.
Bex considered her answer. She remembered the garish letters emblazoned on the doors, the worrisome content of the graffitied message. The taut line of Donahue’s lips after he told her the Lantern had been suspended until further notice.
“No ma’am,” Bex said. She shoveled a spoonful of peas into her mouth, forgetting for one brief moment of insanity how much she hated them. But if she was chewing peas, then she wasn’t talking, and she wasn’t sure what she would say to her parents about the graffiti. As Maplethorpe alumni, they both held the school in high esteem, and Bex knew they entertained no criticisms of things of which they approved. Things of which they didn’t approve were rarely, if ever, discussed within the walls of their home. On the rare occasions when protestors made the evening news, her father would grab the remote with a wordless utterance of disgust to change the channel. The Rating System had served the Johnson family well, and both her parents were staunch supporters.
Difficult conversations were never on the menu for family dinner. They picked up topics that could be carried and discarded with ease. The weather. Award-winning period films. The latest innovations in medical technology. What absurd modernist reimagining of classical operas were to be staged at the theater of which they were valued patrons.
An act of vandalism, particularly one that bled revolutionary sensibility, was hardly the sort of thing the Johnson family discussed.
Bex’s mother hummed thoughtfully. Bex had learned to hate that sound. It always meant her mother was about to make a comment that would grate at Bex’s nerves.
“Dr. Rawlins mentioned an unfortunate incident that occurred on the first day of school. Apparently some young delinquents saw fit to deface school property with spray paint.”
Bex blinked, chewing her peas extra slowly.
“I find it interesting that you didn’t mention this to us earlier.”
Bex shrugged, though she knew her mother despised shrugging. “I didn’t think it was that important.”
Her father made that same disgusted snort he normally reserved for people with political views that failed to align with his own. “You’d think someone would be teaching these kids respect. Especially with what we pay in tuition.”
Bex’s mother tsked. “One would think, darling.” Her eyes, the same dark brown as her daughter’s, bore into Bex’s own. All their features were similar. The same high cheekbones. The same dark brown skin. The same thick curls, although her mother’s were perpetually tamed in a tight bun. Bex could probably count on one hand the number of times she’d seen her mother’s hair loose and free. “I’m sure you wouldn’t know a thing about it, but if you do hear something, I hope you’ll remember your responsibility to report it.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Bex insisted, which was true.
Her mother hummed around a dainty mouthful of steak so raw it might still be breathing. She always did like her steak bloody. Bex couldn’t understand how, since her mother spent much of her day looking at the raw red goop of the human body.
“Perhaps that artist friend of yours knows something.” The tone of her mother’s voice implied much even when her words relayed so little.
“Her name’s Melody, Mom,” Bex said, more to her peas than to anyone at the table. They didn’t approve of artists or actors or anyone who made their career in anything that couldn’t be as neatly quantified as medicine, science, or law. Those were the only respectable areas of expertise as far as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were concerned. Like many of their social rank, being seen to show an appreciation for the arts was no impediment to looking down on actual artists. Under her breath, Bex added, “You’ve known her since we were, like, six. And she doesn’t know anything either.”
“Don’t say ‘like,’ ” her father interjected. “It makes you sound hesitant.”
“Can’t have that,” Bex muttered, once more to her peas.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
Her mother’s knife scraped against her plate. “Well, enough of that unpleasantness. Have I mentioned the new internship opening up at the hospital?”
Bex moved on to smushing her mashed potatoes with her fork. She actually did like mashed potatoes, but every time her parents brought up a new extracurricular opportunity to add to her résumé, her stomach felt as though it were calcifying into stone. She thought back to the schedule she’d made, her crowded symphony of color coding. She’d even colored in the hours she’d marked off for sleeping, a necessity for humans but a weakness among the Johnsons.
“No,” Bex replied. “You haven’t mentioned it.”
“The internship could be a great opportunity for you,” Bex’s mother said, her gaze already back on her steak. Bex’s agency in decisions like these was nominal at best. “Normally, it’s only open to college students, but I’m sure I can put a good word in for you when you submit your application.”
Not if Bex submitted her application, but when. Her participation was a foregone conclusion as far as her parents were concerned.
The calendar flashed through her mind again, with its paucity of empty blank spaces. Every moment of her day was already accounted for.
“I don’t know, Mom …”
“What’s there to know? It’s a great opportunity, Rebecca. Your classmates would kill for a chance like this. Think of what it would do for your rating.”
“College applications are due in a few months,” her father added, as if Bex could forget. The prospect of those applications had been hanging over her like a dark cloud since the first day of her freshman year at Maplethorpe.
“It’s just …”
“Don’t say ‘just.’ It makes you sound unsure.”
Bex fought not to roll her eyes, but her father’s eyebrow—the thickness of which was one of his few facial features Bex had inherited—twitched as if he could see the desire to do so written across her skin.
She had to say something. To outright refuse without a solid reason would be to invite more of their persistent pushing, until she found herself shoved right to the edge of her sanity.
“I don’t think I have the time. I started tutoring a new kid at school.” And before they could protest, she added, “The headmaster asked for me specifically.”
“Oh?” her mother said. “And who is the lucky student who gets to occupy your time?”
“His name is Chase. He plays baseball.”
Her parents shared a jovial laugh.
“An athlete.” Her mother chuckled. “No wonder he needs the extra help. More brawn than brains, I take it?”
The question made Bex bristle, and the intensity of her annoyance took her by surprise. Hearing her parents say less-than-generous things about people they deemed intellectually inferior wasn’t anything new, but hearing them say something like that about Chase, who clearly wanted help but didn’t know how to ask for it, felt particularly cruel.
“He’s not … he’s a good guy, Mom.” She wasn’t sure if this was definitively true, but it felt true. “He just struggles a little, that’s all.”
Her father pointed his fork at her. “Keep it professional, Bex. Now’s hardly the time to let yourself get distracted by boys.”
“Dad! I’m just tutoring him.”
“Be that as it may,” her mother said, “I don’t see why you can’t both tutor him and take on the internship.”
“Sure, Mom. It’s just that I don’t think I have the time to add another extracurricular to my schedule. There are only so many hours in the day, you know.”
The sound of utensils on china came to a very delicate halt.
“Honey,” her mother began, blinking at her daughter like she’d sprouted a second head. “Don’t soun
d so defeatist. It’s meant for full-time students, so it’s only an hour or two a day, once a week. If something’s worth doing, you’ll find the time.”
“How?”
“Excuse me?”
Bex let her fork fall to her plate, the clatter loud in the silence of their elegantly appointed dining room. The decor was the work of an interior designer who had decided that a cold, modernist style had suited the collective disposition of the Johnson family.
“How do I find the time?” The words were out of Bex’s mouth before she could swallow them back. “How do I add another two hours to the day? Who do I talk to about making it an even twenty-six?”
It was the most she had ever talked back to her parents in seventeen years.
She didn’t know where the capacity to do so had come from. Every day, she bottled up her frustrations, her exhaustion, her fears that nothing she did would ever be good enough. Every day, she tried valiantly to ignore how awful the weight of their expectations made her feel. And now that bottle was spilling over, too full to contain one drop more.
“Rebecca Lee Johnson.” Her mother bit out each word with razor-sharp precision. “I don’t think I appreciate your tone.”
From the corner of her eye, Bex noticed her father’s hand flying to his own wrist. He tapped his screen a few times, and Bex’s watch buzzed. He’d docked her. Her own dad had sent her a negative.
“Don’t talk to your mother like that,” he said, his tone inviting no further rebellions, however minor.
And just like that, the indignation that had bubbled to the surface of Bex’s being like a shaken can of soda fizzled out of existence. She slouched in her seat, feeling dwarfed by the high-backed leather chair and the table that was just a touch too large for three people to comfortably eat around.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean it. It was a long day at school and I’m just kind of tired.”
Tired didn’t quite cover it.
“Don’t say ‘kind of,’ ” her father chided around a generous mouthful of steak.
“Not now, Albert,” Bex’s mother snapped.
Bex stared at the disaster zone on her plate. It looked like a hurricane had assaulted the mountain of potatoes and peas, leaving naught but devastation in its wake. “May I please be excused?”
Her mother remained silent for a moment, as if considering withholding her permission. Eventually, she relented. “Yes, you may.”
Difficult conversations were, after all, hardly appropriate for their weekly family dinners.
Bex pushed away from the table, leaving two-thirds of her meal uneaten, if not untouched. The hunger would hit her later, when she was lying in bed, rearranging the colorful rectangles of her schedule to do the impossible.
* * *
Bex’s room was a testament to her achievement. Or overachievement, as Melody liked to say. Ribbons dominated the wall above her desk, an array of mostly blue that told of her multiple victories in science fairs over the years. Trophies weighed down her bookshelves, blocking her view of most of the spines behind them. Every time she wanted to pull a book off the shelf, Bex had to rearrange the entire display. The desk itself was hidden under piles of textbooks and binders and notebooks. Most of her work at school was done digitally, on her tablet, or at the computer consoles provided by the school, but she found studying to be more effective when she opted for good old-fashioned pen and paper.
Normally, she would have gone straight to the desk to get started on her piles and piles of homework, but the sick feeling she’d had all through dinner had yet to abate. She bypassed the desk and belly flopped onto her bed. Burying her face in the pillow, Bex screamed. Just a little scream. Not enough to be overheard by her mother’s eagle ears, but enough to dissipate the growing length of anxiety coiling itself around her organs.
A vibration sounded from her nightstand. She angled her face just in time to see the screen of her phone light up through a curtain of her curls.
The only person who ever texted her was Melody, and Bex wasn’t quite sure she was in the mood to deal with the girl’s incessant optimism.
But Bex was nothing if not a good friend. She snaked out a hand to grab the phone. Her fingers paused in sliding open the lock screen when she saw the sender.
Chase Donovan.
A boy was texting her. Chase Donovan—who was, in fact, a boy—was texting her. At night.
Such a thing seemed so ludicrous that she hadn’t really thought it would ever happen. She had given him her number at Lucky’s, but the logistics of planning a strenuous academic regimen had distracted her enough from the implications.
And now, a boy was texting her.
Bex pressed the phone to her chest and made a sound that was somewhere between a wheeze and a giggle. After a moment’s indulgence—she was allowed that much, surely—she bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to kill any future wheeze-giggles.
“Get it together, Johnson.”
She got it together. Then she swiped his message open.
Hey.
“That’s it?” Bex asked the silence of her bedroom. The silence did not respond.
Melody had always told Bex that boys were like that. As someone with her fair share of suitors—a fact Bex’s mother heartily disapproved of—Melody would know what boys were like far better than Bex. But knowing they were like that and experiencing just how like that they were felt like two entirely different things.
What did one say to a simple, singular Hey?
A greeting like that placed the burden of conversational direction on the recipient, and that was incredibly unfair. But responding with another Hey felt uninspired at best and passive aggressive at worst.
Bex stared at the screen, wishing she’d listened to Melody’s blathering about her romantic escapades instead of tuning her out with well-timed hmms and you-don’t-says. If she had, maybe she’d know what to do. She thought of texting Melody to ask for advice, but in doing so, she would have to explain how she came to have Chase Donovan’s number in the first place. And if she was just tutoring him, then maybe there was no reason to be nervous. They had to communicate to coordinate said tutoring, and there was nothing untoward in that.
But it wasn’t just tutoring, Bex suspected. She thought back to the letter and the smiling jester and the immediate sense of camaraderie the discovery had caused. They shared a secret. And Bex wasn’t about to invite a third party into that. Not yet. Not when it had the potential to be so volatile.
She typed out and then deleted a series of greetings, each one less satisfactory than the last.
Hi there.
Heya.
Salutations.
Sup?
“Ugh.” Bex was disgusted with herself. She could solve theorems that brought mathematics professors to tears, but she couldn’t figure out what to say to a guy.
It hadn’t occurred to her that Chase could see the blinking dots of her aborted typing adventures until he sent a follow-up to his absolutely incorrigible Hey.
Any thoughts on what that letter meant?
“Oh, thank god.” Bex breathed a sigh of relief. He’d offered her an actual conversational thread to follow. She could work with that.
Bex pulled her laptop over and launched her browser. The computer was usually on the bed since she fell asleep with it every night. That habit probably said something utterly damning about her psychological state, but it was also probably best left unexamined.
Let me do a search, see if I can figure something out, she typed back.
Do u want me to send u a pic?
“No,” Bex said aloud. She knew enough about cell phones to know that nothing that was stored on them or transmitted with them was ever truly private. That he typed u instead of you should have bothered her, but it didn’t. It bugged her so much when Melody did it that she’d spent an entire summer breaking her best friend of the habit. Another thing best left unexamined.
I think I remember what it said.
I can call u �
��
Bex wondered briefly if this was what a heart attack felt like. Sitting with him at Lucky’s had been different. They’d gone there under authentic school-related reasons. But the letter had nothing to do with school. And the thought of talking, on the phone, with a real live human boy, while her parents watched the evening news downstairs felt unspeakably illicit. She found that she quite liked the feeling.
Okay, she replied. One word. A multitude of feelings.
Less than a minute later, her phone rang.
She let it ring two times before answering. She remembered that much from Melody’s lessons in how to be a normal teenage girl who did normal teenage things.
Keep ’em wanting more, Melody had said. Never answer before the third ring.
Bex tried, but she could only make it so far.
“Hello?” It came out as both a question and a squeak. Bex wanted to sink into her mattress and die, suffocated by memory foam.
“Hey.” Chase’s voice sounded different on the phone. Deeper, like maybe he was lying down. “So, any strokes of genius?”
Bex leaned against her pillows and propped her laptop on her thighs. She typed the words of the rhyme into Google, but none of the hits looked promising. “Nope. I don’t know if the internet is gonna help us out on this one.”
Chase hummed in Bex’s ear. It sent an electric current of delight down her spine.
“Weird,” Chase said.
“Super weird,” Bex agreed.
“Maybe we just need to sleep on it.” There was a rustling against his phone, like he was changing positions.
Don’t think about him wiggling around on his bed, Bex thought. Do not.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
“You okay?” he asked. “You sound a little, I don’t know, strained.”
“I’m fine,” Bex said, even though she wasn’t. Not really. “It’s just … my parents are driving me nuts.”
Chase puffed a little laugh against the phone. “I know that feeling. We can talk about something else if you want.”
The floorboards in the hall outside Bex’s room creaked.
“Bex, honey? Are you talking to someone?”