The Girl Least Likely

by Katy Loutzenhiser

  Dad: “Beef stew from a can . . . cream of mushroom from a can . . .”

  Sam and I break at the exact same moment, snorting loudly. “What?” says Dad. “We ate every gross bite!” We snort again, dissolving into laughter, and it’s clear we won’t be able to stop if we keep looking at each other.

  “Yes, yes. And you walked to school uphill both ways,” says Mom, patting Dad’s hand. “You’re driving away the children, Harold.” She looks over at Henrietta, suddenly worried. “Hey, you okay, Henny-bee?”

  “Just tired still,” Hen mumbles into her food.

  Carmen sighs. “I need more water.”

  “Me too,” says Hen, following her out to the kitchen.

  Gabriela leans into Mom as they walk off, her eyes trailing my sister. “When does she go back?”

  “Couple days.” Mom sighs wistfully. “Can’t say I care much for this whole empty-nester thing.”

  “Right here, Mom,” I say, making Dad choke-laugh on his beer.

  Mom pauses, chuckling in her spacy way at her own gaffe, as Gabriela reaches out to comb a hand through Sam’s hair. “I’m next.”

  Sam bobs his head slowly as the table grows quiet, before my niece and nephew rescue us with another concerto of party horns. A few years ago, Sam’s dad would have been here at the table, telling adventure stories from his youth or discussing the hoppiness of Dad’s latest home-brewed beer.

  Sam wolfs down the rest of his food and turns to Gabriela. “Mamãe, I should get going.”

  She gives him a disbelieving look. “Samuel. You’ve been here barely an hour.”

  “And we need you for Pictionary,” says Mom.

  “My buddy Grody is having a few friends over,” Sam says politely—too politely. Like he’s handling her, which weirdly stings. Sam is never phony with my mom.

  Gabriela frowns warningly, and his expression shifts from cool to pleading. “Please? Everyone’s going to be there.”

  “Fine,” she sighs, before her eyes flit over to me.

  Sam clears his throat. “Walk me out, Gretch?”

  “Um.” My voice fails me a second. “Uh-huh.”

  In the foyer, I lean into the wall, watching as he slides into his nice wool coat. “Listen,” he says. “I would have invited you to come along, but I knew you wouldn’t want to.”

  I shrug, keeping my voice low. “I take it a few friends over is code for massive keg party full of idiots?”

  “I mean, I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “So that’s a yes,” I say. “And you’re right. I’d rather give Nacho his rectal medication.”

  Sam frowns, which annoys me. Normally that would have made him laugh. “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing. Just . . . you usually stay on New Year’s.”

  “Well, this year I’m going to a party,” he says, wrapping his neck up in his stupid preppy scarf. It’s a truly infuriating scarf. “I’m making the most of the time I have left.”

  “Clearly,” I say, fighting off the sudden burning behind my eyes. I don’t understand what’s happening right now. A few hours ago, I was contemplating romantic gestures of John Cusack proportions. Now I’m picking a fight?

  A car pulls up outside. “Well, that’s me,” he says after an odd little pause.

  It’s freezing out, but I stand in the open doorway as he trudges through the snow. Natalie peers out from the driver’s side of her Mini Cooper, the car light on, and gives me a big, friendly wave. I can see Ethan and Jake Pilsner squished in the back seat. “Happy New Year, Gretchen!” Ethan calls across the yard, cracking his window.

  “You too,” I say, a rough shiver coursing through me.

  I squint as Pilsner stirs, his head quite possibly resting on Ethan’s shoulder. “He’s trying to nap,” Ethan explains. “Saving his strength for tonight.”

  “Ah,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever said two words to Pilsner. Or his counterpart, Grody. They’ve always reminded me of the clumsy bad guys in movies, the ones always screwing up the crimes.

  Sam slides into the passenger seat, saying something to Natalie before smiling easily at her response. The sight makes me ache, senses tingling with alarm. Maybe there’s something to that—to them.

  “Sure you don’t want to come with us?” says Ethan.

  “I’m sure,” I say, hoping my expression reads Not At All Devastated.

  Natalie cracks Sam’s window, leaning over him. “We’ll see you next year, Gretchen!”

  “Yep!” I call out as the windows close back up again.

  Sam holds my gaze as the car pulls away. And this time, I have no idea what his eyes are saying.

  It’s two a.m. and I’m still up. Also, this is happening:

  What’s it going to take to get you back at the club, Sabrina?

  Why do you care, JEREMY? I reply, mocking the way he insists on referring to me by name. (Okay, not my name, but you know. Details.) Also, it’s NYE. Shouldn’t you be out doing something cool instead of texting some random girl?

  You’re not random. And to answer your question, I thought you had something. A spark, you know? Plus, Dolores told me to work on you. She wants more girls for the competition.

  Well that’s a little reductive.

  It’s not. Sometimes you have to be heavy-handed to level out the scales. Guys always think they’re funny. (Though I really am.) Sometimes you ladies need a nudge.

  Hmmm, I say. Thank you? Anyway, I can’t.

  Why not?

  That’s where I leave it, the Why not? just sitting there.

  I put the phone on the charger and pad down the hall. Carmen went home with her parents about five seconds after the ball dropped on TV. Meanwhile Henrietta was already zonked out in her room before we even counted down from ten.

  I wash my face and brush my teeth, a slow dread seeping in. Soon, Hen will be a state away again, and Carmen will be nearby but busy with another grueling semester of architecture school. And I’ll be stuck going back to Carlton High, hiding away in shadowy pockets of awkward-girl obscurity, even in the presence of my oldest friend—especially in his presence.

  I spit, annoyed all of a sudden. I know it’s normal to feel weird around a crush. But should I feel this weird? It’s hard to tell: Is Sam being cruel or oblivious? It’s not like him to be either.

  Back in my room, I tidy up, lingering on mementos here and there. This space hasn’t changed much since middle school, the edges of my mirror lined with yellowing movie stubs, old photos, and postcards from Sam in São Paulo, or Carmen in Manila. I’ve even kept my dorky old Justin Bieber poster—pre–neck tattoo, the Selena Gomez era. It was a simpler time.

  My eyes land on the floor by my closet, where I dumped Sabrina’s high-heeled booties after carrying them inside last night. The black outfit is crumpled up beside them, red frames resting on the heap. I guess Carmen wasn’t overly concerned with returning them to their owner.

  I reach for the glasses, putting them on as I walk over to the mirror. I still can’t believe I went out like this.

  I pick up a hairbrush from my dresser and hold it to my lips. “You know how people either love cilantro or hate cilantro? I just feel okay about cilantro. Is that something I should be worried about?” I laugh under my breath. “Stupid . . .”

  Nacho yips in the doorway and I jump.

  “Jesus!” He stares, that tiny face locked in a permanent smile. “You liked that, huh? Little herb humor?” His tail vibrates.

  “Okay. Well . . .” I think. Jokes. What even are jokes? “Uhhh . . . okay. What’s the deal with calling it the birds and the bees? Like, did a bird bang a bee or . . . ?” Nacho tilts his head. “Yeah, that wasn’t very good.” I sigh down at him. “Bet I could write a set about you, huh, little buddy? Talk about how you’ve usurped me as the baby of the family?” He holds his chin out and I crouch down and give it a scratch. “Did you usurp me, Nacho?” I say in Mom’s absurd Muppet voice. “You did! Yes, you did!”

  I sit all the way down,
letting Nacho help himself to my lap. “But hey, that’s life, right?” I meet his beady eyes and shrug. “Nothing stays the same forever.”

  Five

  Shy Overalls Girl | Female high school student, invisible to her peers due to an affinity for overalls. Is actually a supermodel.

  I step into the hall after third period, immediately bumped by some kid’s huge backpack as he swivels around cluelessly. I inhale, then let it go. Carlton High is never as bad as I think it will be after these long periods of dread. But it’s hardly a joy, either.

  “Gretchen,” calls Annika when I reach her locker. “What a relief. Yours is the least idiotic face I’ve seen all day.”

  “Aw. That’s nice.” I pull up the recording app on my phone. “Hey, before I forget. Can I get a quote from you on your time at wind ensemble this year? Somehow working for the yearbook has turned into me having to talk to people. It’s awful.”

  “Sure,” she says, swapping out folders before locking up. “The experience has been . . .” She sighs as we walk. “Like dragging multiple boulders up a hill all by myself. No one around here understands the concept of practice. The pursuit of excellence doesn’t end just because you got accepted early to Middlebury, Darren.”

  I stop recording. “Okay, great.”

  “Really?” says Annika.

  “No, not really. You think we’re going to print that for all of posterity? You shitting on Darren and his early onset senioritis?”

  She laughs as we find our table in the cafeteria, piling our backpacks, her oboe, and miscellaneous schoolwork onto the free half, blockading ourselves in. I don’t think anyone’s ever tried to sit with us before, but it’s best not to chance it.

  Annika rolls up the sleeves of her vintage windbreaker, thematically at odds with today’s bushy tulle skirt, not to mention the vaguely Game of Thrones–ish braided half updo she’s got going on. The girl defies categorization, and it always somehow works, bright colors screaming against her freckled pale skin. She looks abruptly disturbed as she pulls a tray of grocery store sushi from a paper bag. “There’s this one section of my audition piece that keeps tripping me up. . . .” She eyes her music folder. “Do you mind?”

  “Course not,” I mumble through a bite of PB&J.

  Within seconds, she’s lost in the music, loosely conducting with her wooden chopsticks between pinching at avocado rolls, white-blond hair grazing the table. An outgoing senior, Annika Baumgartner is hell-bent on getting into Juilliard next year. Most days, you can find her practicing her oboe or daydreaming about the type of life in the fast lane only a professional oboist can expect. I sort of envy her single-mindedness. She knows exactly what she’s meant to do with her time on earth.

  Anyway, I like our quiet lunches. They give my mind time to wander, with another human sitting right beside me, thereby validating my existence. Looking around the caf, I check on my favorite characters—like Deborah from math team, who somehow managed to convince the school that her pet iguana, Pete, is a service animal. Pete is a real hit among the Mathletes, from what I can tell, and eats a lot of tater tots. There’s also Mr. Radcliff, the young biology teacher who always take his lunches out here. It’s both cringey and sweet how hard he tries to connect with students. In fact—I squint—did he just dab at someone?

  I look beyond him, and my breath hitches.

  Sam has walked in with a tray, his gaze fixed on the boisterous table waiting for him across the room. I can hear his laugh over the din of chatter when someone calls out an unintelligible inside joke. It doesn’t sound like Sam’s real laugh—the one he saves for me. I wonder how many people around school even know we’re still friends.

  You’d never guess from moments like this one.

  Sam turns back abruptly, his gaze finding mine. Shit. Was I staring? I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue: a sign of how very okay I am, despite our weird tiff at my house the other night. He nods, warm eyes softening—a silent It’s all good.

  Before I can think, I reach for my phone and text him. Hang soon?

  I watch him check it, hesitate, then type back: Little busy this week. My heart sinks. But then the three little dots appear on my screen. Actually how about Wednesday dinner?

  I look up, nodding yes across the caf. I’m heady with relief and giddiness as he returns my smile. Sam wants to get dinner. Dinner is good!

  With a sigh, I glance back at Annika, only to do a double take. “Wasabi!” I blurt out. She freezes, staring down at the chopsticks holding nothing but green goo.

  “Whoa, good save,” she says. “How long was I under?”

  “Maybe five minutes?” I laugh. She was about two seconds away from popping that whole thing in her mouth.

  “This audition may actually kill me, Gretchen.”

  “You have been especially intense,” I say, “even for you.”

  “My dad has agreed to extend my practice window to midnight. On the condition I go out to eat with him once a week. He says he’s started to forget my face.”

  “Aw. I can’t tell if that’s sad or cute.”

  “I can’t wait to get to New York,” she says. “What do you say? Apply to schools near there next year and then come watch all my super-sweet oboe gigs?”

  I smile through a prick of sadness at the thought. “Actually, I’ll be stuck here for college. I shouldn’t complain. It’s free with my mom’s job, so it’s kind of a no-brainer.”

  Annika looks confused. “But isn’t your sister at Dartmouth?”

  “Well, my mom wasn’t tenured at her job when she got in, so it would have been cheaper but still not free. Also, I think my sister was more of a worthwhile investment. Since she has one of those Good Will Hunting, ‘This Wall of Gibberish Just Spoke to Me’ brains. There was no way my parents were going to deny her the Ivy League. My big brother was the same story. Not as brilliant as Hen, but he checked all the right boxes. I’m more . . .” I shrug. “Average, I guess.”

  She frowns. “I wouldn’t say that. But hey, free is good.” She picks at her ginger, then pushes the tray aside. “Anyway, tell me about your winter break.”

  I open my mouth, images splicing together. I see Sam’s hand on my cheek in the studio. A stage. Bright lights, and demon tea. I see Ethan’s photos with the snow angels. Jeremy’s last text. And that black bundle of clothes still heaped on my bedroom floor. “Well?” she says. “Anything interesting happen?”

  I laugh. “Nah, not really.”

  By the time the last bell rings, I’m so done, so itchy to leave this place, that I’m bordering on slaphappy.

  “I’m just saying, superlatives are so tired,” I whine to Mr. Owens inside yearbook headquarters. Our adviser often bears the brunt of my obnoxiousness while I’m at school. I’m weirdly less reserved around teachers than I am other students, and I guess all this energy has to go somewhere. “At the very least, we could be having more fun with them. What about, like, ‘Most likely to one day own a weird amount of cats’? Or ‘Most likely to get super rich but still only shop at Marshall’s’?”

  “‘Most likely to become a taxidermist?’” Ethan offers from the doorway.

  I startle. “Oh, uh . . .” I turn his way as he drops his stuff on a beanbag chair and starts unzipping his camera bag. “Yeah, see? Ethan gets it. Or what about . . . ‘Most likely to be part of a throuple’? ‘Most likely to start a cult.’ ‘Most likely to commit a white-collar crime’!”

  Seemingly unamused, Mr. O loosens the tie under his sweater vest. I think of him as a Cool Dork—maybe something for me to strive for in adulthood. “Thank you for that compelling input,” he says in his usual deadpan. “But this is Natalie’s vision. She’s the editor.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me,” says Natalie, appearing inside the room. It never stops striking me how annoyingly pretty she is, all eyelashes and shiny curls. Cavewoman instincts, deactivate! “Personally, I’d love to see those in print.” She frowns, setting her bag on our big communal table. “But the school would probably
get sued if we called a student a future cult leader, right?”

  “Oh, big-time,” says Mr. O.

  I puff my cheeks, a bit petulant, and she laughs. “Hey, any progress on collecting those club quotes, Gretchen?”

  “Uh . . . getting there,” I say quickly, and by that I mean I have a single, unusable quote from Annika. This assignment has really thrown me for a loop. I didn’t exactly get into yearbook for the community engagement—or for any reason, really, other than the fact that every kid here is required to do at least one club. For the record, I am cognizant of the irony in documenting all the cool stuff I don’t do at this school for my only extracurricular. But at least in the past, I worked strictly on layout. This year, we’ve shrunk to a team of three: one editor, one photographer, and one everything-else person, who is me.

  “Okay, well.” Natalie regards me strangely for a moment, then goes to study one of her many to-do lists on the dry-erase board. “Just . . . when you get a chance.”

  I bob my head, happy to make this future-Gretchen’s problem. So far, whenever I’ve started to approach someone in the halls with my recording app open, I’ve frozen up, hit with the sudden urge to run. I think maybe my fight-or-flight instincts just weren’t installed correctly—like the task of talking to fellow teenagers is my version of being hunted in the savanna.

  I glance back at Mr. O as he exhales. “Was that the end of today’s opening statements, Gretchen?”

  “Yes,” I say, very serious. “Well, almost. In conclusion, let us usher in a new dawn. Really revolutionize what a yearbook can be, you know?”

  Mr. O’s nostrils twitch. I think he secretly enjoys all the shit I give him. “Actually, that segues nicely into our next order of business.” He waves Natalie and Ethan over, and after a moment, we’re all standing around him, circled up. “Principal Young has a request for us this issue. She’s extending our budget to include a whole bonus section on the history of Carlton High, in celebration of its one hundredth anniversary.”

  “History,” I say flatly. “That’s, like, the exact opposite of all the fun, hilarious stuff I was just saying.” Ethan chuckles and Natalie holds back a smile.